Every home needs a network
>> This sounds interesting. This is hypothetical. Suppose I have four pcs and three printer in the house located in three different rooms located on three floors. I would like to connect these computers and printers to a file server that would be located in one of the rooms that I use as an office. What is the bill of material and the cost for this? I'm assuming I'll will need an electrician to acquire the coax cables and to attach to connectors, PC's, hub, whatever? And I'll install Windows NT software myself. (Also, I need every computer to be able to access the WWW using regular, POTS, dial-up.)
Mary<<
1. Use Category 5, plenum-rated twisted pair cable instead of coax. Typical installation in standard office space is about $125 per cable run, but expect somewhat higher in a residential setting. It's more trouble for the cable installer to crawl around in your attic, drill down through the tops of wood studs, etc.
2. Install all the cable you think you might ever need at one time. It's cheaper and cleaner.
3. An unmanaged 8-port 10baseT hub will cost about $100. Most of the low-end hubs tend to be commodity-like.
4. Microsoft has a new entry-level NT package called Small Business Server. It includes NT Server 4.0, Exchange Server 5.0, Proxy Server 1.0, Fax Server, and Modem pooling software. Because it's so new, there are a few bugs, and support from Microsoft is just starting to get rolled out, but the price / performance ratio is right. A 5-user version costs about $1300.
5. The fax server software included with SBS doesn't support any intelligent fax boards, so don't expect heavy-duty faxing capabilities. It does, however, integrate with your Outlook contact list. When you want to fax a document from an Office97 app, click file, send to, and pick a contact.
6. The modem pooling software will support either a standard POTS dial-up modem (I'd recommend Courier external) or an ISDN Terminal Adapter (Bitsurfr, etc.). The cost of ISDN isn't that much greater than POTS service, and lots of ISPs in our area charge the same amount for a 33.6 account as an ISDN account.
7. If you really want to mess with it, you can configure Exchange Server to periodically dial your ISP, dequeue mail from the POP3 mailbox account(s), and put it in your Outlook inbox.
8. If your PC's don't already have network hardware, I'd recommend the Intel 10/100 PCI NICs. We've had some compatibility problems with the 3Com 3C905's, particularly with Windows 95.
9. I don't' know your level of PC expertise, but I will be somewhat surprised if you can pull the whole thing off single-handed. If you decide to hire someone to do it, I'd expect them to take about 15-25 hours to do the whole thing, depending on stuff like hardware compatiblility issues, problems coordinating with the ISP, problems coordinating with the telco (if you go ISDN), etc. We charge $150 per hour for our engineers.
Hope this is helpful.
JonK |
