Introduction

I was beginning to warm up to the new environment. In addition to the shag rugs and couches they went the additional mile and installed about six or seven hammocks. With the furnace on full-blast they would have been as at home as if they were still in Sacramento. This was not your typical networking gig by any means. What was bothering me was the thought that multiplying the amount of users by ten and adding them to the system would send the whole thing crashing down. What’s more, there wasn’t that much time even when I was hired, and now there was considerably less.

Figure 1 shows our advanced network layout. I've gathered all the file servers and added them as separate domains to the network. I also took the highly recommended step of adding each server to the other's Hosts file so that, just in case for some odd reason the Domain Controller/DHCP Server and their backup went down, the clients would still be able to reach the servers.

Figure 1: The basic layout for the Advanced network.

I wanted as many fallback plans as possible when dealing with a large network where any number of things can go wrong. This isn't so much of an issue when you're only dealing with ten or fifteen machines. But once you get into the hundreds of nodes, it will save your network a lot of downtime while you pinpoint and fix the problem.

The key word is redundancy. There are a couple of ways that this network could have been set up. The users could have been split into different groups, with access to the individual servers divided by group (Sales, Finance, etc.). I chose to split users into (Windows) domains, largely because that's how their company headquarters network was set up. So to save time, I simply imported their accounts. Keeping the domain organization will also be important in Part 3 when we create a VPN tunnel to the company headquarters network.

Figure 2 gives us a more complete picture of the network. (Note that the single lines in Figure 2 connecting the servers to the switches actually represent groups of individual connections between each server and a switch port. So there are a total of 7 ports used per switch. So if the first server switch is destroyed by molten lava or Crazy Beth from housekeeping... bringing every fileserver connected down with it... this network will survive for a number of reasons.

Figure 2: Detailed server layout for the Advanced network.

The first reason is the precaution we took in adding a hosts file with each server listed on each of the machines so that, even in the case of a Domain Controller freakout, productivity would not be interrupted. The backup servers could also replace their primary counterparts that they're backing up at any time with a very minimal loss of active data. And finally my diagram was detailed enough that I posted it in the middle of the server room, and users could easily navigate their way around the servers with a pen drive if need be.

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