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Recent Networking Projects

 

Installed remote control and administration software so that an employee could work from home.

Installed an 8-port switch to provide an extra bedroom with coverage for a Chappaqua house.

(archive follows)

Our most recent networking project was reconstructing a data center for a small business after a server crashed and burned.

The company decided to purchase a Dell PowerEdge 2850 after our recommendation that this machine would be a fine state-of-the-art workhorse and could definitely replace any and all functionality present on their downed machine. IT professionals we spoke to stand by this particular model as a fine starting point for a new Windows Active Directory domain.

The machine was then protected by a state-of-the-art firewall. We found the firewall easy to set up and configure but the unit shipped with the wrong power cord so this was a bit confusing at first. We were also not happy with the brackets and hardware included for the rack mount.

Server 2003 and Active Directory were both properly hardened but these technologies admittedly took some getting-up-to-speed. Notably Active Directory Delegation was crammed and this turned out to be a subject with many tentacles! Third party products were researched for delegation purposes and this information was passed on to our clients.

An FTP server was set up under IIS 6.0 but there were some strange errors which Microsoft was happy to provide some free technical support on. Apparently after making changes to the list of FTP servers, one must restart IIS from time to time. We were not happy about that. The Microsoft engineer told us that the IIS 'metabase' wasn't getting updated quickly enough. This is not what we needed but eventually all problems were rectified.

We found Active Directory Integrated FTP User Isolation to be somewhat painful so we stepped down our ambitions to Non-Active Directory Integrated FTP User Isolation which worked immediately. We didn't see a great benefit to getting it to work 'the hard way'.

Workstations were locked down with group policy and standard precautions were taken to guard passwords. Workstation profiles were migrated to domain profiles. We found this to be quite a nuisance but we understand that there are tools out there that can assist us next time.

All in all a very successful migration to a new Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Domain.

Call us at 914-469-7545 or email us at our office for more information. We look forward to hearing from you!