Networking newbie

[Chuck Swiger]

On Oct 18, 2006, at 9:33 AM, Brent Marsh wrote:
> I've been working with FreeBSD machines on and off for several  
> years now.  I
> am looking to set up my first network.  First for home, and second  
> for an
> office environment.  I want to make sure I follow 'industry  
> standards' so my
> network will have everything that any network in corporate America  
> might
> have, with no corners cut.

Actually, it isn't hard to do significantly better than the average  
corporate network, even if you do cut corners.

> As a total networking newbie, I'm looking for step-by-step  
> instructions.

This is impractical without knowing the details about your network,  
hardware resources, services and users, etc.  Given adequate  
information, it turns into work that people normally bill one for.  :-)

> I know the network topology, but don't know how to make them  
> 'work'.  Do I
> need to 'define' a domain?  What is it that makes my network a  
> cohesive
> unit?

For your network to be a cohesive unit, it needs to be managed.

This means that it needs a network admin responsible for the network  
to organize the resources available, implement and maintain the  
services needed by the users of the network, provide documentation  
and policies for these users so that they know what services are  
available (such as email, filesharing, Internet WWW access, printing,  
etc), and how to set them up or get help doing so.

It's possible for a complete novice or newbie to learn how to  
configure and maintain a network by doing so, but you're not going to  
learn everything needed in a day (or even in a decade)-- working with  
a skilled network admin will bring most people up to speed much more  
rapidly via their example than self-learning.

> If someone could point me to a step-by-step document, that'd be  
> great.  The
> FreeBSD handbook has all of the components (I suspect) but not the  
> actual
> concepts of getting it all to work.

Unless your office is entirely FreeBSD-based, you will need to think  
about and deal with other operating systems; the FreeBSD handbook is  
a good reference for setting up many services, but it does not  
discuss the care and feeding of Windows clients (or Mac clients, or  
Linux clients, etc).

-- 
-Chuck