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         DJMsoft |
How will networking help me?Allow your employees to easily share files and information.No more copying files to floppy disks and the like in order to exchange data or documents. Either set up your machines in a 'peer to peer' network and share common folders/directories or, a better solution is a dedicated 'file server' on which all work that needs to be shared is stored. In both scenarios, the files are always available to all your employees(unless security policy dictates otherwise). If you want to use a central file server, we recommend the use of a linux server. This operating systems is quite happy to talk to your Windows or Macintosh computers in their own 'language', and can even act as a domain controllers for Windows domains. Share an internet connection.Does your company use the internet for business? Most areas are now covered by one of the 'broadband' services(cable or ADSL). The price of these 'always on' connections has also dropped dramatically, with services available from as little as £15.00 per month. It no longer makes sense to carry on using a 'dial up' service over a slow modem. With a broadband connection, there are two main ways of sharing it:You can install a hardware 'router' which connects on one side to the internet(in a similar way to a computer) and on the other side to the computers within your network. Most, if not all, hardware routers also feature a fairly good built in firewall and will allow port forwarding, allowing you to direct requests to/from computers within your network, or dropping(ignoring) them. This goes a long way towards beefing up your security. If you prefer to have more flexibility than the hardware router allows, we recommend the use of a linux gateway/firewall machine. this has all the advantages of a hardware router plus lots more features are available. For example, if you do your own website, the linux machine will happily run the world's most popular webserver, apache. It will also run one of the most widely used database servers on the web, MySQL. You can convert your Access databases to run from MySQL while maintaining your Access interface. Protect yourself against email viruses and spam.Cut down drastically on email viruses and unsolicited 'spam' by having your linux server collect all email for all your employees, reject almost all the 'spam' and scan all the rest for viruses before putting the mail into individual users mailboxes. All of the foregoing is possible using a linux server. There are several antivirus engines which run on linux; we recommend McAfee. Since the email scanning is all done before the email reaches a Windows machine(most viruses/trojans are written to attack Microsoft products), there is very little possibility of any virus penetrating your network and wreaking havoc. This assumes that your virus definitions are kept up to date. Also, you should be aware that any anti virus system is vulnerable to brand new viruses until the AV companies have produced a 'signature' for it. Treat all email that you are not expecting as suspect. If you have a networking issue
that you would like to discuss,
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