Subject: Re: Linux network design
From: John Blagg (jblagg@ak.net)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2002 - 15:43:50 AKST
Mike,
This is an area where there may not be a single answer. The answer
depends heavily upon the operations of the company, and its employee's
abilities to evaluate and perform data administration.
For example, in a small office where computer literacy is at a minimum,
the use of NFS or similar to make a "common" or shared area may be as far as
you need to go. But for most businesses, you are going to have to segregate
information based on operational needs, with some sort of "corporate" area
for secured and private information, another less secured filespace for
hr/payroll/benefits, and then a "private" filespace for general company use,
and then "public" for information that those outside the company may be
given access. Users must be given priveleges on these different areas for
different reasons, and possibly temporarily for certain tasks.
You can see that this makes for a mess. You can also see that it creates
one of the prime problems with the Windows environment, which lacks some of
the features necessary to implement and audit the above in a straightforward
manner. The unix file system is not much better, but the tools exist to
manage this in a simplistic manner.
The upshot of all this is that most businesses end up with networked
storage partitioned off into four different areas, each having their own
needs and requirements in terms of administration and backup. More
importantly, users have to be educated that the movement of data between
these areas constitutes a sort of "publishing" or "secretizing".
But don't get me started...
The ususal structure you end up with is like this:
network mount point #1-->Private/Corporate
nework mount point #2-->Private/Payroll
network mount point #3-->Public
network mount point #4 through N-->Private/Users/Account#1, etc.
Sometimes you just share out at the "private/user"level and let the
users sort out their account names, but this rarely works for long..
--jb
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Barsalou" <mbarsalou@aidea.org>
To: <aklug@aklug.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 2:42 PM
Subject: Linux network design
>
> I would like to start a discussion about setting up a completely Linux
> office. One of the things I was thinking about was how users store files
> etc.
>
> What we would do in a Windows environment is map a drive letter to a share
> on the server and everyone would access that share through the drive
letter.
>
> It seems to me how you would do this in Linux is on the client computer
you
> might use NFS to mount the server share on your machine.
>
> What other ideas do people have about this?
>
> Mike
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Thu Feb 07 2002 - 15:44:07 AKST