WARNING: Only for the non-tl;dr's.

I'm going to try to explain the setup as best as I can. I don't really have any experience/certification in setting up an IT environment from scratch. I only have about a month left at the place I'm working at now. I wouldn't even bother but the majority of the people there are family of my gf. Any help is appreciated, and forgive any wrongly used verbage.


The Setup: 2 retail stores and a "main office". At the main office there is a server running windows 2003 as well as ~10 computers. The 2 stores have about ~6 computers each and a linux based Versatile Systems kiosk. No one seems to remember who setup what and where. Each location has a dsl modem which feeds into a Cisco Pix 501 firewall. The computers at the two retail stores lose connectivity to the network frequently. It's usually a coin flip whether or not I can access the server remotely from the 2 stores. Recently, the modem at the main office died and another one was purchased. I set it up after spending some time with AT&T figuring out the passwords and etc. Now however, if the modem is fed into the firewall, the firewall will not allow any connections to the internet. If the modem feeds straight into a 24 port switch the internet works fine for all computers directly connected to the switch. They also have an older looking switch which has ethernet jack inputs but no outputs. I don't know exactly what it's called. It looks like a circuit board for a switch, but instead of having ethernet jack outputs it simply has ethernet cable wires connected to the circuit board. These cables then run through the wall and above the ceiling to the other rooms. Only a few of the computers have accepted the new internet connection after the modem failure. Since I'm unable to connect to the server or other computers via the netwrok at the 2 stores, I'm unable to use network printing. I'm wondering if there is a DNS issue because My Network Places never really worked right.

What I would want to do, unless this can be solved another way, is redo the DHCP server as well as the DNS. I don't have any experience but I'm assuming google will help.

Thanks for the read

4/16/2010 11:41:23 AM

i'm going to go out on a limb and say you have no clue how to set that firewall up, correct? sounds like that's your problem.

4/16/2010 11:44:32 AM

Judging from past posts and questions in here... This will end badly.

4/16/2010 12:22:06 PM

^^ Correct

^ Correct

I was hired to do clerical accounting work...

4/16/2010 12:42:18 PM

I don't mean for this to come across sounding rude to your company, but this will end badly. If they can't or won't hire someone with experience to set this up for them, then they should expect to either get hacked, or have future problems.

4/16/2010 12:50:47 PM

^^ lol..yeah, going from knowing basic plug and play linksys home router setup to a pix firewall is not exactly a great idea.

4/16/2010 2:01:08 PM

Ouch... clerical work to network systems?

I'd call someone with experience. Then when/if something goes wrong you have someone to complain at that is not you losing your job.

4/16/2010 7:47:45 PM

Ya dude. Go hire someone. They got a problem with it, call one of us and we will be glad to hack their network.

As its said, keep your day job.

4/16/2010 8:02:51 PM