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Richard Brown wrote: > Hi > > I believe there are two approaches to building a local area network > (lan). The usual approach certainly when using xp etc is to build a > workgroup around a cluster of computers all talking to a > switch/hub/router. The second approach seems to be around a domain. > And it is this approach that I want to try to learn more about. > > What is it please and how does it work? Does it mean you create a > server and then all computers feed of that etc? The reason I am asking > is because we are about to purchase several new computers for work and > we want to speed the whole network up and also protect it more. All > the computers currently log in to a file server and also a database > server and I am wondering whether we could also route the internet > through the servers to provide additional protection to the network. > But we are also looking for speed improvements on accessing data from > the database and wonder whether this will help. > > Many thanks for the help. > Okay, well a domain basically centralises things like authentication and security. On a workgroup anyone who wants to login to a PC will need a user account on an individual PC. This works fine if you have a couple of computers (for instance in a home or a small office environment) but if you have say 10 or more PCs it can start to be a bit of a nightmare with regards to administration. When you have a domain you have a server which acts as a domain controller (although this has pretty much been replaced by Active Directory on Windows 2000 Server upwards). The domain controller will store details of the user login accounts and passwords and other security details such as password expiry and other bits and pieces. Samba can be configured to act as a Domain Controller (SME Server which I did you a copy of has the option to act as a domain controller). When you have a domain, each machine must be a member of the domain. You need Windows XP Pro, Vista Business/Ultimate or a Linux machine running Samba. IIRC you can configure MacOS X to also be a member of a domain although it's been so long since I did anything like that I can't remember exactly how to do it, IIRC it involves Samba anyway. You can use Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000 I wouldn't recommend it due to them no longer being supported by Microsoft. When a machine is a member of the domain, a user can go along to the machine and just login (assuming their password hasn't expired or their account is locked). They don't need an account setting up on the individual machine. They can also be setup to have a roaming profile which basically stores their settings (or at least most of them) on the server so when they login to a new machine their settings are carried over. The beauty of having a domain controller is that you only need to setup one user account. When the user logs, a login script will be run which can attach things like drive letters to shares (which can be on the domain controller or another machine if need be) and they can also automatically attach to printers (well there's a whole lot of stuff you can do but these are two basic examples). With regards to routing the internet, I would suggest looking at setting up something like an IPCop box. This can be run on a fairly old machine (one of my clients has a P3 1GHz with 256MB Ram for this which is overkill for what they want!) and it can share the internet connection, provide a proxy server (to cache things like web pages to speed things up a little), cache Windows Updates (with the Update Accelerator addon) and also provide Anti-Virus scanning on your internet browsing and block dodgy sites (although I found for anti-virus scanning and spam blocking etc a faster machine was required). With regards to your database server, is this a local server? What OS is it running? What is the network speed? Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html