Summary
Our organization will be online and working on a single network segment. Everyone in the organization will have a workstation, and many of the engineering development team will have more than one computer. Generally, the workstations (whether they are desktop units or mobile laptops) will be running Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional with Microsoft Office as the office productivity suite. Engineering will run Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows.NET, and Linux on their machines. They will be installed to be multi-bootable to whichever operating systems are needed. The engineering development servers will also be dual bootable to either Windows servers or Linux. Windows domain issues are resolved by using Samba. Real service providing machines (file servers, print servers, email servers, etc.) will be dedicated machines and will not be dual booted. Microsoft Windows domain issues will also arise in Windows software development because it is anticipated that any products developed must understand and collaborate with the customer's chosen security model that includes the Active Directory.
Our system administrator will be responsible for setting up the network and the networked services. He or she will also be responsible for maintaining the desktop systems of those individuals who do not want to administer their own systems. Generally, these individuals are outside of the technical team.
The remaining chapters will address most of the issues that arise in such a network. It is not our intent to go into great depth on many of the issues. References to other works and URLs will be provided to assist you when the details of a particular topic are beyond the scope of this volume.