Network Design Question

[gothic_type]

Hi,

I've got to give a group presentation next week about the design of a (hypothetical) network that includes a number of windows computers with ethernet connections, and a number of Sun UNIX computers with ATM connections. Our group has to talk about the protocols/services involved in this network.

So far we've identified that it'll need DNS, Mail and Authentication services as well as DHCP, File and Print services. What I was wondering was if anyone could give us some pointers on issues that would be involved in this network as well as any pointers to information that would be of use (specifically of how ATM and ethernet would interact in such a network, as well as UNIX/Windows).

I'm not asking for anyone to give us an exact answer of what we would need (in fact I don't want that - we need to do the work ourselves), but any help would be appreciated.

Cheers,
ac

[KorpDeath]

That's a seriously broad requirement you have there. What area of that are focusing on? And as far as need, are you talking hardware requirements or what?
Is it a 30,000 ft view or is it granular?
Sorry for the questions but could be a bit more specific?

thx

[Nokia]

Wow, switches, routers, Doman Controllers, the list could go on.

Maybe write your presentation but when you get specific questions ask them here?

[gothic_type]

Our group has to talk about the protocols/services involved in this network.

I was basically asking if there were any (common) services that I didn't mention in my first post. Also, I'm not talking about any hardware, and I'm not looking for any vendor specific stuff. What I was wondering was whether there were any services that you would normally want when you were running a network with both Windows and UNIX machines within a small business.

Cheers,
ac

[phishphreek]

KorpDeath and Nokia are right. You need to be way more specific. How detailed do you want to get? You can go on and on listing services that a "small business" might want or need. It all depends on the type of business and how many users they need to support.

Network time services to keep all the machines and devices with current and accurate times.

Does the company need a website or ftp server? Would those services be useful in house on your intranet?

Update services of some sort to keep your machines patched.

Firewall and some application level content filtering proxy.

Intrusion detection/prevention systems?

Network monitoring services?

VPN services for remote access?

How about access to mail services from the public internet?

How critical are the systems? Do you need hot standbys or some cluster for high availably?

Etc. The list can keep going and going. I think you need to refine your scenario a bit. From which perspective do you need to view the infrastructure?

[bsdpunk]

Typically you would be running active directory for the windows machines, to centralize authentication for file sharing/printing etc. If you did this you could integrate OpenLDAP with it. In a real world network integrating them together would probably be too scary. You might just set up smb on the unix machines. A lot of offices use jabber for interoffice communication. What is the network for? And why are the Unix machines connected directly to ATM?

[gothic_type]

Cheers for the replies - I think we'd covered most of what's been suggested but it's good to hear it from other people.

bsdpunk - basically it's just a hypothetical scenario...I'm not sure about why the Unix machines have ATM interfaces. It's the first assignment in a small class, and we were split into groups to look at different things (hardware, security, services, etc.). AFAIK the idea is more to give the lecturers an idea of our current understanding, and the talk's not meant to be very detailed.

But it's good to get the responses since we hadn't thought about time services or redundant systems, etc. Although I suspect that clusters and the like will be covered by other groups.

Like I say it's at a very simple level and I think the responses in this thread pretty much cover what we need to do. I'll maybe point out some things to the rest of the group, but we might just need to mention them in passing since I doubt we'll have time to add other stuff to the slides now.

Cheers,
ac