Network+Admin

I had a good conversation recently w/ another Teacher/Tech Director at a small private school about bandwidth issues - I shared a couple points w/ her that I know will help us start a conversation about best practices for those who are dealing w/ the enormities of "network issues."

1st thing to look for - a vendor you trust. In my opinion, it doesn't matter what you go w/ as much as who you go to when it doesn't work! I have appointments w/ the following companies, and I'll share my impressions after meeting w/ them.

CDW - I've used them for about a year now, and have come to rely more and more on my sales rep to help do some of the heavy lifting in many research/purchasing projects. The work that he puts into it and the timeliness of his follow up is pretty good. That said, here's my notes from our call -

Enterasys - I went to workshops by both Entrasys and Lightspeed at the TETC conference in Dec. I really don't like sales pitches in the form of a workshop, but it was a good way to educate myself about what they were about, and how they differed (didn't look like they did, but details are available to prove me wrong.)

SmoothWall - Notes here

2nd thing - they do all look the same initially - and the feature sets, while accomplished differently, all should accomplish these goals:
 * 1) High throughput w/ easy expandibility. Right now our solution, while safe, bottlenecks all our traffic through one machine handling dhcp, routing, filtering, and firewall. We need a solution for each of those tasks, but not all coming from the same Pentium D machine (w/ only 2 gb of RAM)
 * 2) Easy to understand GUI layout: that means either a well written help file or training built into the purchase.
 * 3) Easy import features for user lists- If there's one thing that will make me procrastinate more, it's the thought of having to manually input something 200 times...

3rd thing I'm looking at is - do i need another piece of hardware? Virtualization is here, I've got 4 servers and about 2 - 3 1/2 jobs to do on them; why not simplify? I read this article about [|The End of Security Appliances], and started looking at [|VMware's Server] software... more notes on that to come.