Day 0000 0100

Server Setup Part 00000010 – Filesharing and DHCP

The morning began with downloading the updates for Windows server 2008. There were some chipset drivers missing is well. These needed to be downloaded from the Dell website.Drivers can be a real pain. Dell has simplified this process by placing a service tag on the back of the computer which can be used to identify the appropriate drivers.

While updates were downloading, we used Webview to check our settings.

IP/Route/Fowrading settings

Webview provides the ability to view the connection status of other switches, servers, workstations on your network.

Routing tables allow traffic to be directed through the network. The switch addresses were manually typed into the routing tables of the main switch. Our group switches required for entries in their routing table.

The ability to control routing allows for different levels of content filtering. The filtered content can be routed through one switch while unfiltered content can be routed through another. The practical example of this is seen in teachers being able to access YouTube from their computers while students are not from computer lab computers.

The next task was to create a share folder on the server hard drive that would be shared with users on the network. There are two levels of security for sharing files and folders. These are the file level permissions and the other is the share level permissions. Users accessing the server are giving permission based on the groups that they are assigned to. Both permissions were set for the folder giving user access by selecting read, write and full control. A word of caution is in place here, file level permissions take priority over share level permissions.

DNS services were also set up on the server. The DNS services is classified as a role. Both DNS services and file services were enabled on the server.

DHCP Services were then set up on the server. DHCP It stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol which allows for the server to assign IP addresses to computers coming onto the network. I scope of IP addresses were assigned to be dynamically given out (51 to 99). This is more than enough for our scenario but a wider scope of addresses may be needed for an institutional setting.

Knoppix DVD was used to verify that set up was correct. The DVD was placed into a workstation connected to our switch and then booted. The files on our server were accessed as well as those on other servers within the network.