All About Your Electronics
Networking
The aim of creating a network is to share information and other resources such as printers and Internet connections.
The design of a network is critical to the success of the project. At the present time networks are normally designed to operate at quite high speeds (100Mbits per second transfer rate). The design and the installation of the required cabling can make all the difference between the system operating at these speeds or something considerably less. Reliability of data transfer is also compromised by design and installation.
- Galaxy Electronics range of Network services include:
- · Full design, installation, setup and implementation
- · Network design consultancy
- · Project management
- · Installation of additional network ports
- · Diagnostics and troubleshooting of existing networks
- · Network upgrades
- · Re-cabling
- · Server upgrades / replacements / Operating System changes
- Networks
- The Network Operating Systems Galaxy Electronics support are:
- · Windows NT Server
- · Windows 2000Server
- · Windows 2000 Advanced Server
- · Linux
- We also have experience with other systems such as LanTastic and UNIX. The latter is a much more complicated system to set up and administer. Linux and other flavours of the Unix operating system are rapidly becoming a reality in even the small business environment now, mainly due to their low cost of purchase..
- Galaxy Electronics also supplies and fits the following network devices:
- · Routers
- · Bridges
- · Switching Hubs
- · Firewalls
- · Fast Network Cards
- · Patch Panels
- · Fibre Patch Panels
- · Fibre Backbones
- · Fibre-optic Hubs
- · Remote Access facilities
The simplest network design uses Windows-based PC's to create a peer-to-peer network (involving no actual fileserver). This is suitable for networks of up to 10 PC's or so. This type of system does not provide many advanced features, such as security of access. It does allow several machines to be connected together, and allows access to printers, hard drives etc. on the network to be shared together. The system can still be configured with Internet access from any or all of the machines. E-mail systems can also be configured also. The system is reasonably cost-effective in the smaller business market due to there being no fileserver. This sort of system can be used with the operating systems Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4 and 2000.
Larger installations are usually based around a fileserver. This is a particular type of computer, which is a machine like any other on the network. The difference is that it's purpose is to run an operating system dedicated to the task of serving the other computers. You do not normally use this machine for everyday tasks.
Cabling
We provide cabling solutions either direct from ourselves or via a recommended third party. This depends on the complexity of the design, the type of building to be networked and the number of ports to be fitted. Currently cabling uses standard Category-5 data cable, to Category-5 structured cabling (ports used for data or telephone systems) through to fibre-optic solutions.