Exercise Solutions

Exercise 2: Possible Solution

The first three questions were included on the Research Objectives worksheet; the last five questions serve as example questions. Your research objectives will probably be different from those offered here.

Questions	Sources	Specific Locations	Information Discovered
What vendors provide easy-to-implement web server software?	Internet web sites Personal experience	www.lotus.com www.microsoft.com www.novell.com	Lotus, Microsoft, and Novell each offer robust web server applications that can mesh with our current network operating system.
What hardware is required to implement a web server?	Internet web sites Personal experience	www.lotus.com www.microsoft.com www.novell.com	Each manufacturer will provide varying information needed to install and configure web sites on its server software.
What type of network operating system (NOS) is our company using now?	Experience Network administrator	Ask the network administrator. Your sources of information can be, and often are, colleagues, management, and vendors.	For this question, you can call upon your own experience, ask your company s network administrator, or decide for yourself what NOS is in place for the fictional company in this exercise.Knowing the type of NOS that is currently in place can impact the decision on what web server to implement.
Where will the web server go in relation to the firewall?	Experience Books Internet sites	www.cert.org	Place the web server on a separate subnetwork. By doing this, traffic to and from the Web server will be isolated and will not transverse the private network. This will also ensure the internal network s bandwidth is not hampered by traffic to the Web server.
What is the yearly cost to host a web page through a third party?	Experience Magazines Web hosting companies	Choose your favorite web hosting company.	For example, one company may charge $50 per month for startup web sites and 10GB of bandwidth. Another company may charge $43.00 per month for 10GB of bandwidth.

Exercise 3: Possible Solution

Feasibility Study for Caulfield Education Supply Company
Written by Justin Case

Executive Summary

Recommended product: Windows Server 2003, Web Edition

Microsoft IIS 6.0 is included with Windows 2003 Server. It will mesh with our current network operating system and will be familiar to administer, secure, and work with. Although there have been some security alerts for the product, these are well documented and repairable through service packs and security patches.

Audience impacted: The primary audience impacted by hosting our own web server will be our customers. Once the transition from an external web hosting company to our internal server has been made, it will be seamless to our Internet guests.

Financial obligations: A new server is required. The server will be based on a hardware array for fault tolerance. The tape drive will be a tape array for fast backups and restores . A UPS device is also required. This system will cost $18,500.

Although our company is currently using a fractional Tl line, it is recommended that we replace the current connection with a full Tl line. This will keep our internal network from competing with the network traffic. A full Tl line will cost $945 per month.

Recommended actions:

• Assemble a project team and begin developing the project charter and implementation plan.

• Order the Tl line upgrade and equipment as soon as possible.

• Designate or hire a web server administrator and get this individual into IIS 6.0 training.

We can minimize network downtime by first creating and securing our web site on the new IIS server. We will have to change the DNS information from our web hosting company to reflect the new IP address of our web server. This switch can take up to 72 hours to populate, so the transition should be made over a weekend or holiday period.