Small office LAN configuration

[TobyA]

Dear All,

I work for a company with 3 different sites in the UK. Two of the sites are currently linked with a VPN. We would like to bring the third office onto the WAN for obvious reasons.

There are only about 10 people in the London office. We mainly use Windows 2000 servers / workstations in our other offices. Normally I would set up a new W2K server as a PDC / File & Print box with a tape backup.

However, given the size of the office I am tempted to forget about having a W2K domain and just use Workgroups. This way we won't need any PDC and, because they will be part of our company WAN, we can store their files on one of our existing servers so there will be no need for a server at all.

All we would need would be a 2MB ADSL / SDSL connection, a router and firewall....

Has anyone ever set up an office like this? Can anyone see why this would be a really dumb idea?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Toby

 

[manarth]

One possible annoyance - if you're DSL line goes down, you won't be able to access your files; depending on the nature of the files, there may be a noticeable speed drop, given that instead of a 100 MBps internal switched network, you'll be limited to a 2 MBps shared DSL line.

There may be security implications, as the files are sent across an open internet connection (unless you use a secure VPN or similar)

Not a very technical answer - just a couple of thoughts!

Marc.

 

[TobyA]

Thanks for your response Manarth.

We would connect to the other offices using a VPN, so I think the security aspect would be OK.

The thing I'm worried about, as you mentioned, is the speed drop. I'm hoping we will be able to get over that by copying files locally, working on them, and then uploading them back onto the remote server.

Toby