Setting up branch offices

Hi folks !

I am in need of a little guidance today.

The guys who sign my paycheck asked me to look into extending our network to
include our branch offices.

This is our actual setup: four physical locations (1 H.O. and 3 B.O.) The
head office has a windows 2003 R2 server which is AD and GC it is also the
DNS DHCP and WINS server. There is also an Exchange 2003 server and an SQL
2005 server. We have a relatively small network mind you. H.O. has ± 50
employees, B.O. 1 has ±20 employees, B.O. 2 has ± 10 employees and B.O. 3 has
± 5 employees. We have permanent vpn tunnels setup from all branch offices
to the head office and these tunnels are used for Exchange service access and
some network shares.

I have been mandated to setup servers at each location that would allow for
more network services to be available to everyone such as file sharing,
printer sharing, user mobility between offices, backups...you know, the usual.

The servers we are using at this time replaced some windows 2000 servers we
had and that have been out of use for a few months now. What would be the
ideal way for me to recommission these servers and tie all my offices
together?

Thank you all for any assistance you may provide.

J-P

 

You are asking for quite a lot from a newsgroup. Typically if you don't
know how to do it you'd contract your local MS Gold partner to come up with
a design based on a full review of all of your requirements.

 

Thank you Jeremy,

I realize that 1-this is a hefty question for a newsgroup and 2-asking an MS
Gold partner to help with this would be the best thing but my bosses do not
want to allocate any budget for this. They want me to do it.

I was not asking for step by step instructions here you know. I was just
hoping that someone might be kind enough to suggest some literature that
would be helpful and maybe a few good links, anything of that nature.

 

Well.. first thing i'd to is to look up virtual private networks (VPN's)

some of the SANS and Microsoft security guidelines. Then you wanna find
out how to do backups... and to check on 'em remotely..

one of the first things you wanna look into is the remote desktop that's
avail for free, since it's built-in.

make sure you have server 2003 since its firewalled by default..

hhmm.. that's all i have time for... gotta run. this should keep ya
busy for a little bit..

i've told you all i knew, didn't take long, did it?... ;-)

j

 

Thanks Brains,

I'm already using server 2K3, VPN and SAN. I guess what I'm bugging on is
the question concerning forest setup. Should I setup child domains or not?
Should I just setup member servers in each branch office and add them to the
parent domain?

 

J-P, I'll be the first to scream that Others may be more experienced at
this. I know our local Novell guys would do the childs, so as to manage
it all at once. There is a LOT to say for that approach.. However, I
know you're thinking reliability here. So do we....

j.