What are some of the key things to know when designing a local network? I work at a small High School and we’re trying to set up users accounts/privileges/security etc…
We have approximately 30 computers for teachers and some 60 computers for students at the school.
We’ve hired a new network administrator to set the the network. In your opinion what do you think we should focus on the most. All these machines are ready to be formatted to start the network. Here are some of the things I want to focus on:
Firewall for our high school. Any ideas of a good one?
Setting up privileges,
Different user accounts
Automatic updates for all machines
Restrictions for teacher/students
This is a basic network we are shooting for. We have Windows XP on all our machines. We just want each user to log in using credentials and enjoy using Office and the net safely and securely.
In the future, we want to install MS Exchange server and set up email accounts for faculty members.
Any website/source you can think would be much appreciated.
Firewall/filters is a must! Because these are children and will no doubt try Google rude words and so will the teachers (the teachers are also naughty don’t just believe it’s just children) or you’ll find them playing on Social Media sites or even shopping on eBay. Though obviously Super User accounts will need creating first and you don’t want the staff to be able to alter too many permissions - let alone the students.
Updates I wouldn’t bother too much about; well yes they are important for security but you can schedule them and 90 PC network is rather small scale anyway and can easily be manned by one technician.
If you Network technician is any good (s)he will already know how to prioritise such things anyway. I assume you already have the routers and switches configured, functioning, wired and connected, etc.
Are all the machines of an identical configuration? If they are you could have a “drive image” file on the network server and if any machine goes wrong to the point of needing a complete re-install, you’d just use a program like Norton Ghost to grab the image from the server and use it to re-install everything before just checking the relevant settings on the machine.
For the students if you can set up a maximum number of pages that they are allowed to print to discourage them from sending print jobs of numbers of blank pages through to the printer.
Which version of WinXP (Home or Pro) is installed? AFAIK PCs running the Home version of XP can only “see” a maximum of 8 machines at a time on a network. What OS is the network server running?