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Questions tagged [small-business]

98 questions
103
votes
11 answers

Cooling Server Closet - No A/C Is Possible

We're moving into a new office in an old building in London (that's England :) and are walling off a 2m x 1.3m area where the router & telephone equipment currently terminates to use as a server closet. The closet will contain: 2 24-port switches…
JamesCo
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16
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6 answers

Active Directory vs OpenLDAP

This is for a small company (12 developers) who haven't implemented any centralized user database - they've grown organically and just created accounts on computers as they needed. From a management point of view, its a nightmare - 10 computers all…
Cory Plastek
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12
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6 answers

Single Person ISV, What Type of Server Hardware do you Recommend?

I am planning on taking a small product of mine live soon. I was wondering what kind of hardware you would recommend for a new small website. Is using the 'Cloud'(Amazon) a good option. Or is it better to have intimate control over my hardware? Are…
jjnguy
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11
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7 answers

Best way to connect multiple switches together

We currently have five 24 port 3com unmanaged switches. Four of them are 100Mb switches with no gigabit port (MDI Uplink port is 100Mb). The fifth is a full gigabit switch which we use for all of our servers. They are daisy chained together at…
Beep beep
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11
votes
3 answers

VirtualBox - use in small office and backing up

I run a small office consisting of a 8 man development team and a couple of managers. We're thinking of moving to a hardware setup whereby we have 1 single powerful server running several VirtualBox VMs - one for Samba fileshare acting as DC,…
user16529
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11
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5 answers

High server availabilty for a small business

After having a bit of scare with a server that wouldn't come up one morning, the higher ups have decided that the business needs a high availability / fail over setup. We have 5 main servers (4x Linux, 1x OpenBSD) all of which need to be running for…
Matthew
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11
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13 answers

What decent small-office level routers are there

So let's say I have a network of less than 20 computers including a server that needs to be accessed externally. What router/firewall solutions would you recommend? It can be either hardware or software and would need to be able to…
Glenn Slaven
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10
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16 answers

At what point does a development company need a dedicated sysadmin?

When a company's primary focus is developing, deploying and maintaining software, at what point would it be prudent to hire a dedicated sysadmin? What are the warning signs that you need one?
Drew
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8
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1 answer

What is the proper way to configure Active Directory and Domain Controllers when only a dynamic (not static) IPv6 prefix is available?

When neither provider-independent address space or an ISP assigned static prefix is available, and a delegated prefix (via DHCPv6) is the only option… What is the "best practice" for configuring Active Directory and Domain Controllers to support…
Corey
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7
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4 answers

Setting up a small office network

I'm the de-facto system administrator for a small law office. I'm looking for help to setup the network in a good way. Here's the basic layout/requirements: Windows based. The Server: A headless windows vista machine accessed by VNC from my…
JoshuaD
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7
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6 answers

Getting rid of your server in a small business environment

In a small business environment, is it still necessary to have a central server? Speaking for my own company (a small charity with about 12 employees) we use our server (Windows Server 2003) for the following: Email via Microsoft Exchange Central…
andygeers
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7
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2 answers

pfSense Firewall or Linksys/Cisco router for small offices

I'm about to start switching some networks around for multiple small offices. Each office has about 10 to 15 users and 10 to 15 computers. Each office has a spread of generic routers and access points. The routers vary from being used as routers, to…
Tim Meers
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9 answers

What are you implementing for communication in small business enviroments?

Background I'm working in a small company that is implementing and supporting network infrastructures in small business environments. Many times cost is a concern so I'm constantly looking for cheep / free solutions. Personally my favorite (at the…
kyrisu
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6
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13 answers

What is the safest country to run an IT startup?

I regularly come to think of what would be the best place to create and run a small IT company say a start-up. By safe I mean: Not bothered by criminals collecting money from all businesses in the neighbourhood Not bothered by the army of lawyers…
Mastermind
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5
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2 answers

Can I host my web application in Cloud?

I have made a small web application created in J2EE which i want to develop as a "business". Can i host it in one of the cloud services ? Please do advice me as well on this issue. Will the cloud service be reliable over a long time ? Thanks in…
Anand
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