[K12OSN] Not recreating the wheel

[Christopher K. Johnson]

Lewis Holcroft wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Well now that the demo is complete. I have complete buy in. Oh they 
> want this in place next month. Oh...
>
> So I figured I would write you all with a little map of before and 
> after and you could indicate potential problems.
>
> Currently there are five locations. The main location has one router 
> to the internet and one router to each of the four remote offices. Our 
> product is located on the main server and is accessed via a telnet 
> client. Hence the small bandwidth to the remote sites. The Main server 
> is also a DHCP server and the routers to the remote locations support 
> DHCP relay. So was are able to control the network routing and the 
> like from the main server. This setup also allows us to route web 
> browsing out through an internet connection at each location and limit 
> traffic over the very slow ISDN lines.

What is used to firewall the Internet connections at each remote site?  
I presume you are planning firewall rules on the Linux Server WAN 
connection at the Main Office site.  But what will protect the remote 
locations?

Also what is the bandwidth and proximity (in network hops) between the 
Internet connection for all your sites?  If it is much better than the 
ISDN you might want to consider VPN between sites instead of ISDN.

It is extremely unlikely that NFS mounting homes for users over ISDN, or 
even over Internet VPN will provide satisfactory performance.  The rest 
should work fine.

If you define an account and home directory on the system a person most 
often uses, perhaps remote desktop access for the person when at a 
different site would be the best approach.

-- 
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   "Spend less!  Do more!  Go Open Source..." -- Dirigo.net
   Chris Johnson, RHCE #807000448202021