How would I network 3 locations in 3 cities?

steveo_181

steveo_181

New Member
Hopefully someone can help me out here. I am the computer guy for my office, but i've set it all up on a P2P network on a workgroup (not a domain), and now, what I want to do is network:

Location A (my office in CityA) which is a workgroup of 6 xp boxes, a mix of home and pro, and a Microsoft windows 2003 file server & a linksys router.

To Location B my house (in CityB), network of 2 XP pro machines and a Windows Server 2003, same linksys router.

And if possible to my parents house in (cityC), which is a workgroup of 3 XP Pro comps, and a windows 2000 server, with a d-link router.

I've been wanting to do this for a while but not too sure where to start.
Do I set up a domain in each location? OR is there non-microsoft software to link it all? I want to be able to go to "my network places" and see all of the computers and shares across the 3 locations... is it even possible?:confused:

Thankx,
Steveo
 
i think what you would need todo is set up a virtual private connection (vpn) for each of the offices, then i'm nnot sure but i think that virtually connects all networks together, if that was what you wanted you would need help from someone else on howto do it

Lee :)
 
There is more than one way to skin a cat. Microsofts default protocol (netbui) isn't routable, so basically it only works on a LAN. Fortunately netbios gives the same functionality across a WAN. For this to work, however, you need a mechanism to associate the computer names with IP addresses.

One method is to put an LMHOSTS file on each machine. This is a tediuos job and quite time consuming to maintain. Another method is to setup a WINS server. The address of your WINS server then needs to be put into the configuration of every machine on the network. Fortunately this can be taken care of by adding a record to your DHCP servers (if you are running them).

Even these methods will fail, however if you are using local IP schemes and using the internet as a carrier. (as the internet won't be able to work out where to send the trafic). NAT is a possible method of getting around this, but will still require some pretty cleaver configuration to get it to work.

VPN is probably the easiest solution. This basically allows each router to send everything that it sees on its LAN to the routers at the other sites. So everything that is happening on each site gets replicated at the others. If you don't set this up properly, this can result in a huge overhead on your bandwidth.

Basically it all depends on what you have at the moment, what you are expecting to do across the WAN (seeing each others machines is one thing, running access databases across the WAN is quite another).

How many machines on each site, what OS are they running, what is your network topology, what are you intending to share across the WAN. What is thier geographical separation.

One of the greatest parts of this project is to manage expectations of the users. Your users may be expecting to be able to share drives and casually open documents from each others machines to edit them, much the same way as they do locally. Even if you have a fairly good upstream rate from your ISP, this is likely to cause disappointment.
 
Vpn

Thanks for the repley texmex;

I am the only user really, I want to be able to access the files on the server. I think its a 5mb down and 1mb up both at my house and the office.

I installed VPN on my server at my house, but does it need to be the router too, and then have a hub?

Do you have any experience with Hamachi? It's sposed to be a vpn client/server but I can't seem to browse files... or ping...

I might be in over my head on this tho. :o

-steve
 
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