Need help with a small bussiness solution

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Polemus

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I was approached the other day by relatives that runs a small business to assist them in easing their troubles.

The business consists of more or less 7 staff members, But they are growing slowly, approx. 1 new staff member a year.

They have a few issues:

  1. No shared space to save documents, they toss around usb sticks and update docs on each machine every time someone updates a file
  2. They have no backup solution except the files floating on the "The Stig"
  3. They have ADSL and about 10 vodacom contracts with usb dongles (just in case telkom goes down)
  4. Some pc's are out of range of the router's cables, so these poor peeps need to wait for someone else with internet to go to the bathroom, to send a quick email
  5. They have decent printer, but no-one can connect to it, so almost every pc has it's own printer.
  6. They bought a premises and will probably move in, in about 6 months time (renovating) so what ever I do must be able to be moved and re-set up.
  7. They have a few small psu's just in case power goes down, but not all machines have one.
  8. Website and email is managed by an external tech dude, so it is a pain for them to set-up and create new email addresses.
  9. One or two of their machines are shared by random temps floating around, but we do not need to create user profiles for each person

My goal here is to give them a good solution that is scalable, yet not to expensive.

  • Think I want to do is set up the network for all pc's to have internet, I was thinking of a router that has 3g fail-over, this means I will have to install wifi cards on each machine. Any suggestions on routers and wifi cards? performance is important, but not breaking the bank important.
  • I need to get some sort of centralised server up and running. this will be to share documents, and make backups of their pc's. I basically have two options SBSE and WHS. WHS has a user of 10 Machines, they will reach that in about 2 years, but I believe it can be upgraded to SBSE but I have no experience of it, so I am not sure how it will go. SBSE can have up to 25 users, which is probably their goal in about 10 years time. Any suggestion on server os?
  • I want to get their mail hosted where they can manage itself, I am not sure if SBSE has this capability, but I was thinking something in the line of Google Apps. The owner of the business is a little tech savvy, he does know how to set-up pop's and smtp's and he definitely knows his way around a pc, so one can entrust him to do little tech tasks.
  • Regarding wireless... the building they bought has 2 floors with thick walls in between, quite a few offices, how will I get the wifi to relay... I was thinking of hotspots. Has anyone tried those plug thingies, where you plug the device into the wall and it creates a mini hotspot? Some suggestions on hotspot equipment and wifi cards will also be nice.
  • What hardware would you recommend for the server, considering it needs to backup around 7 pc's the hdd space is quite important. I know you can slam in extra drives on WHS, not so sure about SBSE's drive extender capabilities.
  • I need to sort out their power backups, I would prefer to have one central power backup unit, but that is not an option if you look at the new premises, so it will prolly have to be individual psu's, it needs to allow them to save a few docs, and maybe finalise an email prior to the psu runs out of juice.

I know this is a mouth full, but I really need some help here.

Any suggestions, even if not mentioned above will be welcomed. I want to lay it all out to them, cause they only want to go through this process once :)
 
Last edited:
How about this:
- Get a 3G/ADSL router, the standard telkom ones that they supply have this ability. (NETGEAR DGN2200 N300 - http://residential.telkom.co.za/equ...uipment/modems/n300-wireless-adsl2/index.html)
- Get a small decent PC, something like the HP Microserver that esquire often have on sale. Install linux. Its free and easy to setup some of the distributions, most if not all come with SAMBA that allows you to setup windows network shares with access permissions. If its just for files, that should be great. Its a lot cheaper than buying windows server software, plus you don't need expensive rack mounted servers.
I would say for most small businesses 2TB total is more than enough. Get two internal drives so you can at least do a RAID mirror.
Then do yourself and them a favour, get two or three external TB sized drives and use those for offsite backups, a simple cron job will sort that out. Google is your friend.
I've got a small client that their linux server has all their backups, and it often has uptime around 200 days or more. Never goes down and except when the power goes out.
- switch them to Google Apps. Its relatively cheap for the hosted email (USD 50 per user, per year) , plus you also get free google drive space, you can use this for backups of important data. They have just upped the free offering to 15GB per user.
You talk about power problems and PSUs I assume you mean U.P.S' (very different ;-)
PSU = Power Supply Unit
UPS = Un-interruptable Power Supply

Yes, rather just get individual ones for each machine, about R1000 per machine, its a lot cheaper, and if one of them wears out, you can just replace that.
Having a central UPS is not cheap.
 
ozziej said:
How about this:
- Get a 3G/ADSL router, the standard telkom ones that they supply have this ability. (NETGEAR DGN2200 N300 - http://residential.telkom.co.za/equ...uipment/modems/n300-wireless-adsl2/index.html)
- Get a small decent PC, something like the HP Microserver that esquire often have on sale. Install linux. Its free and easy to setup some of the distributions, most if not all come with SAMBA that allows you to setup windows network shares with access permissions. If its just for files, that should be great. Its a lot cheaper than buying windows server software, plus you don't need expensive rack mounted servers.
I would say for most small businesses 2TB total is more than enough. Get two internal drives so you can at least do a RAID mirror.
Then do yourself and them a favour, get two or three external TB sized drives and use those for offsite backups, a simple cron job will sort that out. Google is your friend.
I've got a small client that their linux server has all their backups, and it often has uptime around 200 days or more. Never goes down and except when the power goes out.
- switch them to Google Apps. Its relatively cheap for the hosted email (USD 50 per user, per year) , plus you also get free google drive space, you can use this for backups of important data. They have just upped the free offering to 15GB per user.
You talk about power problems and PSUs I assume you mean U.P.S' (very different ;-)
PSU = Power Supply Unit
UPS = Un-interruptable Power Supply

Yes, rather just get individual ones for each machine, about R1000 per machine, its a lot cheaper, and if one of them wears out, you can just replace that.
Having a central UPS is not cheap.
Click to expand...


my experince on linux is second to none:wtf: what will the learning curve for me be to set up a linux server
 
heres my opinion, i basically became the default "tech guy" in our biz and seen us grow from 2pc's to 50 workstations spread across 2 stores and bla bla bla


1) google docs or dropbox to safely store and backup automatically. if the 2gigs is not enough, they can easily get it to about 6 or 8 gigs with referalls, or shell out $10 and get 100gigs (more then enough)

2) NAS drive? if no server side software required, pop in a nas drive. Have all PC's back up to the NAS and have the NAS backup to an external USB drive (i did this at home with a Synology) If uncapped adsl, you could even backup the entire NAS to the cloud. Again depends on the type of work they do and files they utilize.

3) adsl FTW. Get a D-link telkom router. Has wifi, adsl and USB for 3g dongle

4) get a 16port or 24port switch, run cables. Its a hassle yes, but cable is king :)
Wifi for daily work is pretty ****ty from experience. (always something goes wrong)

5) a printer could connect to your NAS and be shared that way. Once hte printer is on the network, you're all set :)

6) relatively easy to unplug and reconnect

7) no comment

8) just get cpanel access to whoever is hosting their domain (i'm assuming it has that) no need to get a mail server, they simply just need the ability to create/delete email accounts and passwods. This sort of task is a once in a blue moon thing. I'm not a fan of locally hosted mail exchanges, especially for small business. Corporate is another story but not for this application.


Cool post, i'm actually going to blog this as i often get smme guys wanting some tips.
 
I'd suggest rather move as much of the stuff to outside providers as possible since clearly nobody in that place knows what they are doing.

http://www.google.co.za/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html

Though dropbox seems to do better than gdrive with clueless users.

Same thing for backup - rather go with a trusted cloud backup provider.

If you're renovating anyway, make sure the stick the entire place full of LAN cables (all going to a central location/server room). Even if you plan on using wifi...its useful to have lots of physical LAN points.

To be honest I find it somewhat scary that my fellow forumites think that a place that exchanges documents via flash sticks & using hotseat for emails is ready for linux distros and cron jobs onto externals. :wtf:

Polemus said:
my experince on linux is second to none
Click to expand...
That phrase does not mean what you think it does. ;)
 
Maybe I'm security sensitive, I would not use dropbox/google drive to backup non-trivial office documents.
 
DigitalSoldier said:
We have had a lot of issues with Zentyal in the past.

ClearOS also feels a lot more polished than Zentyal, but just my opinion.
Click to expand...

Interesting.


I had the exact opposite experience and just couldn't make ClearOS work.

But I guess it depends when the "past" was exactly. These things change quickly and dramatically.
 
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