[Jiser]

Hi all doing a study into the security, reliability, management and using remote access tools of a network of a world wide oil company with locations on shore and off shore.

Was wondering if anybody could come up with any suggestions or existing solutions to the above.

Topics of discussion would be: Do you think these are any good?

1) The use of satellite communication for off-shore and on-shore communication.
2) Leased lines between remote land based sites including between America/U.K. With satellite links used as backup
3) The use of SNMP for monitoring and managing devices connected to the network worldwide. I am not sure how widely used SNMP is? Would something like citrix be useful alongside SNMP for remote working?
4) Two data centres created for the U.K. + U.S with data being duplicated between the two sites.

[reza_s]

My suggestion would be do some of your own research into this study as I don't think your university would take to kindly to students asking assignment questions on forums in the hope that someone will answer the assignment question for them.

Lets be honest if your still asking to be spoon feed in your forth year of uni you must be a bit stupid!

[Jiser]

You may be 'reza the lecturer' or 'someone else' but here are my views:

First of all I think my University is pretty poor. For instance lecturers turning up for 20 minutes then disappearing. Settings tasks to measure the speed of a packet. All irrelevant. Speaking to a lot of Industry Professionals about the things I have done at university, they said how bad they thought it was. In fact students generally reflect the same views. It also appears exam papers are constantly repeated every year with the same topics. Even speaking to several lecturers about assignemnts given etc they have echoed my opinions as well.

Reza_S having written most of the assignment already I want to see if the below is relevant or already in use. I don't think it is stupid having read around the subject for a while now. I do not plagarise anybodys work. I like to get real world facts before I write anything pointless.

Having used Citrix, VNC and remote managament tools previously in an industrial placement I would be keen to employ their use in the coperation in the assingment and maybe in the networks I manage now.

I am interested in network management, already managing two networks myself I like to get others opinions. Also I am looking at 'network engineer/managament' as a short term career goal. Hence, I bought the advanced technical design guide for Citrix Metaframe xp last year to study for a Citrix exam. Do you know what citrix is? So I am keen to find out how much citrix is in use around the world having only used it one organisation for remote teleworking. Additionally I am studying for my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer exam during my university studies. I have already passed a few of the MCP's on the list, So I wouldn't say I am stupid, well I wouldn't be looking after two networks would I?

In fact I am currently Involved in the 'redesign' of two networks of over 100 systems including servers/switchs/cabling/workstations/laptops. This involves choosing backup options, servers, cabling to run gigabyte ethernet, workstations etc etc. There is a lot of work to be done. So telling me I am stupid when I am actually doing 'networking' for a job is not helpful.


I am also interested in employing some sort of network managament tool in the networks I am looking after at the moment. SNMP is a possibility as well as many 'free' off the shelf products. Howevet they lack control some of them. Windows 2003 provides the agent but in all honesty there is no real control of systems. In fact I have been researching various networking control tools since the beginning of my indsutrial placement and implemeted one in the company to good affect. Though because of the size of the company it is no longer nessessary.

So what would happen for instance if there are constant blue screens on a workstation on an oil platform in the mid atlantic? SNMP does not allow for remote viewing of systems I don't think. So I would employ the use of both SNMP and Citrix/VNC to allow remote logins and monitoring. Best of both worlds really. But also what would happen if the satellite link went down due to a storm and you couldn't access remote systems. There cannot be a line under the sea bed as it is unfeasable. So in that case you have to look at a disaster recovery scenario, which I have talked about in the assignment as an 'important issue for consideration.' Issues I know about already through my 'real world experiance' and not university assignments. For instance the use of back up tape drives, RAID, mirroring, virtual servers, backup sites. In the past I spoke to a few people I knew in the I.T. industry about disaster recovery as I was keen to do the topic for my dissertation. For example I spoke to someone from J.P. Morgan married to my cosuin who told me all about their backup site and how everything is implemented in the case of a 'disaster.'

This is what I have included in my assignment so far. Though the assignment does not mention to include what communication medium you would use. Merely talking about remote managament, security issues etc:

1) The use of satellite communication for off-shore and on-shore communication.
2) Leased lines between remote land based sites including between America/U.K. With satellite links used as backup
3) The use of SNMP for monitoring and managing devices connected to the network worldwide. I am not sure how widely used SNMP is? Would something like citrix be useful alongside SNMP for remote working?
4) Two data centres created for the U.K. + U.S with data being duplicated between the two sites.

I wanted people with experience in the above to perhaps mention if they are reasonable things to use. Having done further reading around the subject it appears most oil platforms do in fact use Satellite communication though not on land. I thought It might be interesting to find out if people thought the above were crap or not.

I also wanted to find out if SNMP is used by network admins on this forum and their experiances with it. As one of the assessment tasks is effective managament using remote access tools. This is research and not spoon feeding. People in the industry providing real facts and not articles from books and googles which may be out of date.

[mustyfish]

I think the question on everyone's lips is if reza_s is in fact the same ****head who teaches networks at bournemouth uni, then WHAT THE **** ARE YOU DOING TEACHING YOU ****. NO ONE CAN ****ING UNDERSTAND YOU.

If you are some randon person then sorry for the above comment and have a nice say.xxxx

[chuckhole]

This could be a very long reply if I went in depth but I will paraphrase instead. I am a Sr. System Admin for an Oil company with locations around the world. I have been to most of them and enjoy my work.

We have used Citrix and I like it and Microsoft Terminal Server for what they are... Thin client computing. They are excellent for deploying common desktops to slow WAN connections and small offices that can not justify having a bunch of expensive servers in house. VPN is a reasonable alternative here as well if you can use the web based application sharing capabilities of Citrix.

As far as Remote Management goes, use a DRAC card in your servers. You can power on and install an entire operating system remotely via a Browser interface. That is as good as it gets.

SNMP does not really come into play until you emply a Network Management and Monitoring solution that performs device mapping, monitoring and notification of your devices and services. SNMP is a common device based protocol that can be used to monitor and administer Switches, Printers, UPS devices and such, not just servers. Products such as Cisco Websense and HP OpenView are very pricey and take a long time to master. I have not had the pleasure of working with Microsoft MOM so I can't go there. One that is not so pricey (much less than $50,000 US) is WhatsUp Gold. Like Dell's OpenManage software, it supports WMI as well as SNMP. Another nice one to try (but is vendor specific) is HP's ProCurve Manager. For the easy (and free) way out, most of your newer networking hardware and printers support direct browser based management of the device. Just type the IP address of the device in your browser and it will take you directly to the device management inerface.

Now, as to disaster recovery: Having a Storage Area Network (SAN) is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The one that we use (EqualLogic) supports volume snapshots and mirroring. This means that if there were a catastrophic failure of the hardware, there is another copy of the critical data standing by. And mounting that data would take a matter of minutes istead of hours or days.

Lastly, if you are using a SAN, then you can take full advantage of a Virtual Machine environment using VMWare. A virtual machine file can be copied over to another host using VMotion and mounted as a virtual machine. A complete system with operating system installation can be performed and put online for use in less than 5 minutes. Templates can be set up for various machine types and purposes. A good example of that would be here in Texas on the Gulf Coast US. If we were being threatened by a hurricane, we can copy over the Virtual Machines to another data center and have the same machine running in a matter of minutes from a 1,000 miles away.

PS. Look into Good Server in conjunction with the smart phones. I use the Treo 680. You can VPN into the network and remotely manage any server from your cellular phone. With Good Server (or equivalent), your corporate email is copied directly to your phone. It is a blessing that sometimes becomes a leash.