If your company hasn't got Broadband - why not?

Fast Facts:-

	The number of Broadband connections in the UK has exceeded 4 million.
	If your telephone exchange is ADSL-enabled you can now get a standard ADSL circuit no matter how far away you are from it.		For a 1 mbps circuit you still need to be within 6 kms of the exchange

The combination of these technologies...			Other Related pages on this Website:- Free Help via Email Network Upgrades and Installations with Windows Server 2003 Hire a Network Engineer Home Page
	ADSL Broadband Wireless Networking (WiFi) Broadband Firewall/Router Windows XP
...has made small computer networks, with all the features you want, incredibly affordable and easy to setup.
There is still a right and a wrong way to do things and so we offer a Broadband Installation Package to make sure you get your network installation right. What Our Package Includes
Before Installation	We'll discuss your requirements over the phone and/or using email to allow you to:-
	1 -	Choose the right ISP to get your ADSL circuit from
	2 -	Prepare a list of equipment you need to buy plus we'll recommend suppliers
	3 -	Make a plan for Installation Day
Installation Day	We'll guide you through setting up the ADSL connection and then networking your PCs and Printers. Initially this is over the phone but, once you've enabled Remote Access for us, we can perform a lot of the configuration for you.
After Installation	We provide 30 days of support by phone, email and remote access to sort out any problems that crop up.

We charge £250 for this service anywhere in the UK

If you decide that you actually want us on-site to perform all the work for you our charge for this is £400.

For on-site visits this price includes configuring up to 5 PCs plus there may be an extra distance-related charge if you are more than an hour's drive from South Bedfordshire.

Call us on 07876 616685 or email us at install@rhebus.com and we'll be glad to discuss how Broadband and simple networking can benefit your office.

The Server-less Network for Small Offices

Servers are great for networks of any size but they add significantly to the cost of running a network. As well as the purchase price of the hardware and operating system, there's the cost to install and configure it properly and then the ongoing support.

This webpage is all about what can be achieved without a dedicated server.

The following sections show what can be achieved with only a modest outlay on network equipment.

Shared Internet Access

An Internet Router provides all the essential elements to give simultaneous, always-on Internet access for every PC in your office without any particular PC having to be left turned on. A typical Internet Router contains:-		Netgear and Linksys have models for around £100
	An ADSL modem - this plugs into the ADSL line and connects to the Internet
	A Firewall and NAT router - this is the shield behind which many PCs can share a single Internet connection
	A Wireless Access Point - for connecting WiFi enabled PCs, laptops and printers.
	A 4-port Network Switch - this allows nearby PCs and printers to connect using network cables.
More expensive routers can also:-			3COM and Draytek have models for around £300
	Control which Internet sites and services can be accessed on a per-user basis.
	Allow VPN connections from the Internet to the local network.

Email

This is important to get right.

You might want to keep your existing email addresses or move to using your own domain name and gradually phase out the old addresses.

With no in-house email server, you will have to use the services of your ISP or an external email service. It's normal to use your ADSL ISP for sending email and have your existing ISP or Domain Registrar maintain a mailbox for each of your users to receive email. This has the advantage that you can access your email from outside the office including overseas. Some external email providers also offer virus and junk-mail filtering.

File Sharing

You should nominate your best Windows XP Pro computer to be the file-share PC to host shared folders and data backups for every other PC. A CD writer on this PC is usually sufficient to make periodic overall backups to perhaps store off-site.

An alternative to using a PC is to buy a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device to host file shares and backups. Simple NAS devices start at around £300.

Printer Sharing

The best way to share printers is to attach them directly to the network as this removes the need to involve any particular PC. To achieve this you'll need a Print Server box (£60) or, better still, buy a printer with a print server built in - these often have the letter N at the end of their model number.

For greater flexibility in positioning your printers you can use a WiFi print server.

Remote Access

Windows XP Professional has the built-in ability to be remote controlled. This means that from your home PC you can connect to your office PC and see and operate its Desktop just as if you were sat in front of it. More impressive still, you can print any documents you have open on your office PC to your home printer as well as cutting and pasting between the 2 PCs.

With a home dial-up connection the remote control performance is acceptable but with home broadband you could forget you're using remote control.

More than one office PC can be made accessible from the Internet and it's even possible to turn on an office PC when you need to use it.

Security

Your server-less network may be inexpensive but you don't want to sacrifice security. Network security is a broad term that covers the following areas:

Viruses & Spyware

Every PC in your office needs to be running an anti-virus program that's kept up-to-date automatically and you'll need to renew the update subscription yearly for around £25 per PC.

Virus and spyware writers often take advantage of newly-discovered flaws in Windows or Internet Explorer so it's important to set each PC to automatically check the WindowsUpdate website and download and install any critical patches listed there.

Spyware is harder to avoid as users are often duped into agreeing to install it at unscrupulous websites. If Internet Explorer's security settings are configured to disallow this then many other legitimate websites will also stop working properly. Windows XP Service Pack 2 has introduced measures to make it harder to catch spyware but you should regularly check if your PCs are clean.

Two of the best tools for removing spyware are free: Adaware and Spybot Search & Destroy

I think that a personal firewall on each PC is optional. It can alert you to worm and trojan activity on your PC and stop your PC catching something nasty from another infected PC on your local network but it can also be a challenge to configure and be an obstacle to file and printer sharing on the local network.

Norton Antivirus 2005 has extended its protection to guard against worms and trojans.

Hacking from the Internet

If your router is configured correctly then this should be next to impossible.

If your have enabled remote access then a remote user's password could be a weak point so they need to choose a complex password. The encryption built-in to XP's remote access system will prevent these passwords being captured as a user types them in so any hacker is only left with the option of guessing a password.

Good security practices should extend to PCs that connect remotely to your network. Otherwise a trojan keylogger could capture passwords or, over a VPN, a home PC could spread a virus to office PCs.

WiFi Security

If you have any wireless connections in your network then these signals will be detectable up to 100 feet around the outside of your building.

Initially wireless security wasn't very good but it's now in the process of being improved. If you use a 128 bit encryption key plus MAC address filtering it will be hard for anyone to gain access to your network and, even if they do, internal password security should prevent them accessing any of your files.

Internal Security

This means controlling access to shared files by username and passwords to prevent some of your users reading or editing certain files. This is an area where Servers excel and it's difficult to make this work effectively in a Workgroup environment especially if not all your PCs are running Windows 200 or XP Pro.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices often come with their own file security system.

Backups

This is security against the loss of important data and is perhaps the most important form of security.

Because there is no server, all PCs will store data files on their local hard drives and there should be an automatic process that runs daily to copy these local data files to the nominated file-share PC. (The files-share PC should copy it's files to another PC that's likely to be turned on during business hours.)

This way there is always a second copy of all important data which is less than one business day old.

For this to work, users should save their files in a consistent location such as in My Documents or on the Desktop. At regular intervals, ranging from daily to weekly, all the data on the file-share PC should be backed up to CD if it will all fit (up to 700mb) or otherwise to another form of removable media. Occasionally someone should take one of these backup media and store it off-site.

This backup strategy is semi-automated, fairly painless and costs very little.

Email data from Outlook or Outlook Express will also be backed up but for this to succeed it means temporarily closing the email program to unlock files an allow them to be copied. The automatic backup script can warn users to do this.

You may need something more rigorous if losing a day's data would be a disaster.

What additional benefits would having a real server bring?

	A dedicated, always-on computer built with hardware that is resilient to various types of failure.
	More rigorous security.
	The ability to handle hundreds of users.
	The ability to place restrictions on what users can do on their PCs.
	You can run your own email server.
	Fully automated backups.
	Another line of defence against viruses.

I recently heard about a company with only 2 PCs who were so dependent on email that a 5 day outage with their contracted-out email service had cost them £15,000 in lost orders.

In this situation you need your own in-house mail server so you can monitor and fix, in real-time, problems with sending emails.

You also need multiple MX records for incoming mail so if your primary system fails, emails will be automatically diverted to a second mailbox on the Internet that you can then access.

The moral is that just because you're a small company doesn't mean you shouldn't have your own server. If losing data, email or Internet access means losing money then you need the best protection available to prevent this.

Fast Facts:-

The combination of these technologies...

...has made small computer networks, with all the features you want,

incredibly affordable and easy to setup.

What Our Package Includes

Before Installation

Installation Day

After Installation