Re: XP NETWORK HELP PLEASE

I should have been more specific about quantity and location so as not to
lead anyone to wrong conclusions. We are a small company with limited
financial resources and I do the best I can to keep up with the technology
while struggling to maintain day to day operations. My corporate office has
8 total hardwired computers and gets accessed daily by two or three laptops.
1 computer is for our bookkeeper one for her assistant. One for our Project
Administrator and one for the projects billing clerk. 3 machines are for
dispatching and one more for the small warehouse to track inventory. Our
owner, operations manager, and local project manager use their laptops. My
position is to setup, fix, train, manage, inspect, invent, implement,
coordinate, purchace, sell, direct, hire, fire, consult and clean up the
mess. Forgive me for not sending out my resume prior to asking for help. The
setup that I have here is simple and can be maintained by any one over the
phone. I have an Office Depot purchased Linksys Router connected by a full T1
and two switches one Gigabit one 10/100. The gigabit switch feeds the
corporate side and the other one feeds the computers on the project side. I
have no remote access open and instead of WEP or WPA encryption I tell the
router not to broadcast the ssid and have a hidden mapped network drive
between my bookkeeper and her assistant to share quickbooks thru the gigabit
switch. The other machines on the project side share one file using Excel's
file sharing capabilities so they can all make changes at the same time. The
three dispatch machines run dual monitors so they can open up the Excel
dispatch log on one screen and our customers in-house proprietary software on
the other screen. We use Cisco's VPN software that came to us via a disk from
our customer with all settings predetermined to access their site. I have
TCP-IP set up for the Internet access and IPX-SPX set up for the LAN. Now
I'm no genius but this config has been working at this site for three years
with 0 maintenance save for the upgrade to the gigabit switch which I bought
along with two cards just to see how it would perform since our quickbooks
file is getting so large. It didn't seem to make much of a difference. Now
after all this time my customer throws me a curve ball and changes the way
their contractors can log into their VPN which affects this project and one
other one that is set up similarly and for the same customer. And I ask for a
little help on where to get some support or give me a suggestion as to what I
might try and your advice is to stop trying to get free help and hire
someone. (LIKE WHO? YOU?) I would rather try to learn as I go so as we
expand I can get things set up the same way. Instead of having remote sharing
or a VPN into our offices I utilize File sharing on Groove Networks another
fine microsoft product that I guess I shouldn't be asking questions about.
This person I should hire, should he be full time and should I pay for him to
fly to each and every location so he can evaluate my systems and make
suggestions as to advanced security measures and software purchasing. Maybe
you could talk to my customers and get them to give their contractors a 20
percent or so increase in rates so as they can afford these services. Thanks
alot for all your assistance and I hope you have a good night.

"Pegasus (MVP)" wrote:


"Tomkat743" <Tomkat743@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7F2ACE3E-1277-4793-8A50-229C97A1ED02@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
What community or support option would best help me reconfigure my
companies
network. I have 7 offices in various locations with about 10 PC's per
location. At each location I have a typical network with a cable modem or
other high speed service, a wireless router, and usually a switch or hub
to
add the additional PC's. In the past this has worked with little or no
problems, save for the occasional downed device or virus. We are a high
speed internet installation company so I typically have someone in each
office who has enough savvy to troubleshoot and fix these type of issues.
Our network is used to transfer large amounts of data locally for shared
Excel files, scans, and shared Hardware resourses. WAN wise we access the
internet, send large e-mail, VPN into our customers site for dispatching
purposes and often remote from the field back to the office to access
information on our lan. The issue is that one of our customers changed
our
VPN access to a location that has the split tunneling turned off and
another
only allows VPN access thru a pre configured cisco 905 router. My thought
is
to install two nics in each computer, run two modems and two seperate
routers
and use one for the lan with internet access and one for the WAN. I am
really
not sure if this is the solution or if it will even work. I know that I
can
change the subnet of one card but i'm not sure how to access the internet
with the lan if i'm using my tcpip for the WAN? I hope i'm not so confused
that I sound stupid but any input or direction would be appreciated. The
customer that removed the split tunneling may give me the option of a site
to
site VPN access but I would than have to figure out how to set up a
corporate
VPN for sites to access that would than access their site.


If you have 7 offices with around 70 PCs in total, with VPNs
and various other advanced facilities then you should engage
the services of a suitably qualified systems administrator.
Trying to get free help in a newsgroup is unlikely to give you
a robust and dependable installation. Newsgroups are great
for giving advice for specific problems and perhaps a few
pointers. You appear to be looking for someone who will
design your system for you, free of charge.



.

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