Building a Server?

[sbridgey]

yes what has been said by KDF is perfectly good and will work, what happens when an employee with a little bit of knowledge plugs his virus infected laptop into the network and the whole network suddenly has a virus and no-one can do any work?

This is the only reason i suggested using a switch with port security.

 

[mace¬]

Please correct me if I missed anything.

Nope! You've missed nothing, you've assumed everything. This is another case of him not knowing what he wants and you delivering what you think he wants. You know as well as me it is a fact of any form of IT.

 

[KDF]

lol your server never gets used!

It's past midnight.. the users will be automated logins for scripts etc. hence the 0. load averages.

 

[KDF]

Nope! You've missed nothing, you've assumed everything. This is another case of him not knowing what he wants and you delivering what you think he wants. You know as well as me it is a fact of any form of IT.

The only thing I based my recommendations on are the items he requested, in essence I have assumed nothing. I might assume that he would want to rapidly expand in future in which case this will not be the ideal hardware for the job, but I did not.

If you wan't anything more than this, then he will need to pay for someone to come in and spend time investigating his company and how it works.

Considering they don't want to pay a pro to do the job for them, and considering this is an internet forum in which he was asking for help based on these requirements... I think it's as good as he is going to get.

Sure, if you want to pay me £500 a day, or even better pay DK £1000 a day then sure you will probably get something you didn't even know you needed.

In this case, that ain't going to happen, my post was an attempt to "put things right" and clear up the confusion and misinformation given in this thread. There are too many 'experts' that are more than happy to give bad or even completely false information.

 

[The Fatty]

@KDF - What version of linux are you running on it? (bit off topic I know, but intersting non the less)

 

[The Fatty]

Also home much are you guys chargin for your services?! must charge stupid amounts based on £500 and £1000 a day!! I charge £20 to £30 an hour and most of the time give discount as I feel its to much for the current climate..!

 

[KDF]

yes what has been said by KDF is perfectly good and will work, what happens when an employee with a little bit of knowledge plugs his virus infected laptop into the network and the whole network suddenly has a virus and no-one can do any work?

This is the only reason i suggested using a switch with port security.

All good and well, but locking down systems, deploying AV with GP and ensuring client firewalls are turned on (with a few exceptions deployed by GP) will be more than sufficient for them.

Have you ever had to deal with L2 switches with sticky ports or similar turned on in the real world ? it's a f**king nightmare lol people like to swap things around and change desks and swap out/in computers. It's just not feasible unless you have the proper infrastructure and support in place.. and even then...

 

[KDF]

@KDF - What version of linux are you running on it? (bit off topic I know, but intersting non the less)

Ubuntu Server, but it's not running a vanilla kernel.. it's custom.

 

[sbridgey]

All good and well, but locking down systems, deploying AV with GP and ensuring client firewalls are turned on (with a few exceptions deployed by GP) will be more than sufficient for them.

Have you ever had to deal with L2 switches with sticky ports or similar turned on in the real world ? it's a f**king nightmare lol people like to swap things around and change desks and swap out/in computers. It's just not feasible unless you have the proper infrastructure and support in place.. and even then...

I am talking about a user bringing in a personal laptop so the company would hav no control over the AV used on it.

Well you could set every pc's MACaddress to be allowed on any port but any other are not allowed, bit more time consuming but cheaper than losing a couple of days productivity.

 

[The Fatty]

you would be better off to have a good AV system in place if thats the only concern...

 

[mace¬]

Good info

What you got to understand is that this bloke is learning, he has been given all this information, he knows just a bit more than nothing about it and the best advice in my opinion is that for both their sakes they get a pro in. Everyone in here is going off vague details.

The business owner is using this keep it in the family rubbish to keep his costs down but you know as well as me it will back fire eventually.

Right or wrong?

 

[sbridgey]

What you got to understand is that this bloke is learning, he has been given all this information he knows just a bit more than nothing about and the best advice in my opinion is that for both their sakes they get a pro in. Everyone in here is going off vague details.

The business owner is using this keep it in the family rubbish to keep his costs down but you know as well as me it will back fire eventually.

Right or wrong?

100% Right

 

[The Fatty]

i would agree with that as well

 

[Mells]

Oh god, not WHS! Does that still do that drive pooling crap regardless of if you want it to?!

lol. I thought someone would say that. For what I need it to do I.e. glorified nas with rdp it does.

I tried Ubuntu server but needed to remote into it to avoid the work internet filter. Couldn't be assed to learn how to configure a proper server.

Kdf is the daddy. Pics of your current setup. Last time it looked like NASA hq.

 

[dk]

The only thing I based my recommendations on are the items he requested, in essence I have assumed nothing. I might assume that he would want to rapidly expand in future in which case this will not be the ideal hardware for the job, but I did not.

If you wan't anything more than this, then he will need to pay for someone to come in and spend time investigating his company and how it works.

Considering they don't want to pay a pro to do the job for them, and considering this is an internet forum in which he was asking for help based on these requirements... I think it's as good as he is going to get.

Sure, if you want to pay me £500 a day, or even better pay DK £1000 a day then sure you will probably get something you didn't even know you needed.

In this case, that ain't going to happen, my post was an attempt to "put things right" and clear up the confusion and misinformation given in this thread. There are too many 'experts' that are more than happy to give bad or even completely false information.

absolutely agree, i said all what you said pretty much on a few pm's we exchanged a couple of weeks ago tbh.

I think he does need help, not my sort of help as i work for too big a company, but a local company offering install services for a couple of hundred pounds a day probably, its 1, maybe 2 days work with some knowledge transfer.

the guy who's company it is is brave asking someone to do it who doesn't know what they are doing imo. Sure, he will work it out eventually, but all its takes is something configured wrong to cause all sorts of issues for months etc.

 

[dk]

Also home much are you guys chargin for your services?! must charge stupid amounts based on £500 and £1000 a day!! I charge £20 to £30 an hour and most of the time give discount as I feel its to much for the current climate..!

i get charged out to customers for about £850 - £1100 a day, the bigger the job, the lower the price normally, as you get a bulk discount, so i am doing 35 days for a customer soon, that was about £850 a day i think, if its a couple of days, then it will normally be £1000 a day, if its out of hours its doubled, so £2000 a day. crazy amounts of money really, wish i saw the majority of it!

If you charge too less for your services it can de-value the service, I guess people expect to pay a certain amount for a decent engineer in the corporate world, its still cheeper than employing someone. If someone is charging £400 a day, then they are going to generally get a £400 engineer, but when you've just spent £100k on a new SAN and some blades, you kind of don't want to cut corners on getting it installed correctly and to best practices by a certified engineer. Getting engineers certified costs money, and so they cost more to use. Getting a £1000 engineer in for 5 days might get it installed properly, whereas a £400 engineer, might not do it completely to best practices and with experience and so it might take them longer, or it might cause you issues further down the line as you grow.

So yes it sounds like a lot of money, but its cheaper than employing a £60k a year employee (costing the company a lot more than £60k) etc. The customer who has purchased 35 days of my services has paid something like £30k, he gets me for 7 weeks in effect, but he's spent £400k on the kit, and he knows me as i installed the primary site kit for him, i spent about the same amount of time there then too. Since doing that job we've actually become mates and he invites me for weekends of drinking with his friends in his weekend cottage, so you can actually become quite friendly with customers. Its quote a sociable job really.

Anyway, enough of that, back to the question in hand......

 

[dk]

you would be better off to have a good AV system in place if thats the only concern...

agreed, f**k all this port security b****cks, we are talking about 5 people, not a whole office of people, av is all thats required. if you were that paranoid, you could leave the server and pc's on the default vlan and then create a dummy vlan and put the rest of the ports in that until you need another port, then when someone plugs something in, they will be on their own little vlan with no access to anything.

 

[sbridgey]

agreed, f**k all this port security b****cks, we are talking about 5 people, not a whole office of people, av is all thats required. if you were that paranoid, you could leave the server and pc's on the default vlan and then create a dummy vlan and put the rest of the ports in that until you need another port, then when someone plugs something in, they will be on their own little vlan with no access to anything.

I am actually going to say i had already thought of that Vlan idea, but after Vlans being shot down i decided i would only get flamed for posting it. lol.

 

[Chapster5]

Wow some good bit of banter in here now. Cheers for the extra info guys, when the shell of the office has been wired out and kit ordered I'm sure once I've set it up (plugged everything in basically) I will see certain things on SBS that relate to what it needs to do. From there it's a matter of

A. Asking on here once more and more than likely get ripped apart with get a pro...

B. google what I'm specifically looking at, at the time (like for instance, how to setup a group policy and add users) and google going here's a list of websites look through them and learn.

I will be the one running the network wires using CAT6 and making sure all wiring is right and in place before any equipment comes in. I still have a few weeks then to play with said equipment to set it up. I can't see a problem it's probably one of the simplest networks you guys would have seen so all these blades and stuff people are talking about won't be needed or setup.

Thanks for all the help guys, especially the people who actually wanted to help instead of palming me off to get a pro

Much appreciated

Nick

 

[Cookie]

Post back when everything breaks x

 

[Chapster5]

Post back when everything breaks x

Watch out... I may just do that :O x

 

[Adam.]

Post back when everything breaks x

But teh wizards will help him.

 

[Silent_Scone]

Server status: OFF

 

[KDF]

I am talking about a user bringing in a personal laptop so the company would hav no control over the AV used on it.

The AV on the clients would stop any propogation.

you would be better off to have a good AV system in place if thats the only concern...

Exactly.

The business owner is using this keep it in the family rubbish to keep his costs down but you know as well as me it will back fire eventually.

Right or wrong?

Oh, absolutely correct. The business owner is a fool trusting all his company data on a n00b (no offence to OP)

absolutely agree, i said all what you said pretty much on a few pm's we exchanged a couple of weeks ago tbh.

I think he does need help, not my sort of help as i work for too big a company, but a local company offering install services for a couple of hundred pounds a day probably, its 1, maybe 2 days work with some knowledge transfer.

the guy who's company it is is brave asking someone to do it who doesn't know what they are doing imo. Sure, he will work it out eventually, but all its takes is something configured wrong to cause all sorts of issues for months etc.

Agreed,

agreed, f**k all this port security b****cks, we are talking about 5 people, not a whole office of people, av is all thats required. if you were that paranoid, you could leave the server and pc's on the default vlan and then create a dummy vlan and put the rest of the ports in that until you need another port, then when someone plugs something in, they will be on their own little vlan with no access to anything.

Why even bother with that.. Administrative down the switch ports.. easy.

Post back when everything breaks x

FLOL.

 

[Carbon-Rain]

I spend my days working with servers and VM Servers, you should look at a server with atleast a xeonon CPU and a minimum of 8GB of ram. Storage wise you want to use a Raid 5 Setup for the OS (3 Hard Drives) and then look at how you want to store the data. I would use a NAS drive connect to the server via iscsi and DFS. The next thing to look at is how you are going to keep a backup of the data, are you going to use a tape drive or something else.

The OS I would recommend using SBS 2011 as it also has exchage built in so you can run your mail server on it, set it up as the PDC (Primary Domain Controler), a WSUS server (Windows Updates). You need to make sure you plan and ask the client the right questions or you will not get a server that will grow. I would look at other options rather than Dell if you want to keep the spend down as they have just raised their prices. Have a look at a company called Novatech they will offer the same services Dell do but at a fraction of the price.

 

[ChrisR]

Carbon, that's all well and good but as people have said you've just assumed things

Why should he choose RAID5 over RAID1?

SBS2011 does have exchange built in, but has he said he wants to run an email server? Better off using Google apps or the like for this amount of people, let someone else have the worry of running and maintaining the email system

Also didn't PDC/BDC die out with NT?

Situations like this just stick to the KISS principle, the list of stuff that KDF noted is nice and simple and will get the job done (it's basically what I did many years ago when I knew relatively nothing).

 

[Chapster5]

Keep this list of suggestions coming as you were all these things I run away an google them they may come in handy in the future. Just a small question though why would you need 3 hdds for te OS would you install the OS on all 3 drives and set tem all up exactly the same? So if anything crashes on one hdd it will swap to the next relatively seamlessly and still run as normal because they are exactly the same?

Nick

 

[sargey]

Go and google RAID configurations.

 

[Cookie]

Keep this list of suggestions coming as you were all these things I run away an google them they may come in handy in the future. Just a small question though why would you need 3 hdds for te OS would you install the OS on all 3 drives and set tem all up exactly the same? So if anything crashes on one hdd it will swap to the next relatively seamlessly and still run as normal because they are exactly the same?

Nick

Have you read up on what RAID is and what it does? Do that first, then look at your question again

Snap sargey

 

[KDF]

Carbon, that's all well and good but as people have said you've just assumed things

Why should he choose RAID5 over RAID1?

He shouldn't and this just makes my point about people stating stuff they obviously don't know enough about.

RAID 1 will give you a better type of redundancy should 1 drive fail and give you greater speed over a single spindle.
Raid 5 will give you redundancy sure, but you will get much slower speeds, need an extra drive (more £££) and when/if one drive fails you will get a huge hit on speed as data has to be calculated on the fly from parity data. RAID 5 offers no pros but lots of cons.

Just a small question though why would you need 3 hdds for te OS would you install the OS on all 3 drives and set tem all up exactly the same? So if anything crashes on one hdd it will swap to the next relatively seamlessly and still run as normal because they are exactly the same?

Nick

See above. You don't.

RAID 1 ensures you have an up to the second mirrored copy of the OS drive, should a drive fail you won't even notice as the server will continue to run just fine. You will just get alerts that a drive is down which you can replace at your leisure (although the sooner the better ) if it is hot swappable you won't even need to shut the server down to replace the drive. And while both drives are healthy your server can read from both drives simultaneously for extra speed !

 

[Cookie]

RAID 6 is what all the cool kids are using nowadays, isn't it?

 

[sargey]

RAID 10 mate. It's got moar of teh Wizzards.

 

[KDF]

RAID 10 mate. It's got moar of teh Wizzards.

... Cause that's how I roll !

 

[Cookie]

Clearly I am behind the times

There's not much call for RAID in a router

 

[Silent_Scone]

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!

 

[sargey]

If you RAID 3 Routers together, do you get 3 times the internetz?

 

[@Spoonie]

Give these guys a call...

http://www.cray.com/home.aspx

 

[Chapster5]

Cheers Spoonie,

Will have a look

As for the RAID 10 that sounds like a great piece of technology that could come in handy. Im assuming its an internal thing or can you get external standalone RAID things?

Nick

 

[sbridgey]

I don't know how viable this would be for you but instead of using RAID for backup why not use the cloud, with the current prices of hard disks and internet speeds getting faster all the time it seems like a really good solution to me. Simple to set up too.

http://www.carbonite.com/en/business/data-backup


Edit: have you thought about what internet connection you require? and watch the video on the link above.

 

[Chapster5]

I don't know how viable this would be for you but instead of using RAID for backup why not use the cloud, with the current prices of hard disks and internet speeds getting faster all the time it seems like a really good solution to me. Simple to set up too.

http://www.carbonite.com/en/business/data-backup


Edit: have you thought about what internet connection you require? and watch the video on the link above.

I do like the look of that! Ill definitely put this forward for a backup solution.

Thanks

Nick