New network issue

[Sambo]

We are currently moving office and whilst designing were the layout etc a few issues arose which i wondered if any body could help me with.

Firstly we run active directry with 2003 and i was trying to think of a way to have kind of backup a/d server to kick in if our main server fell over but i am not to sure how to configure it or really were i would start:confused: Is this a possiblity???

The other trouble i am having is that we are having 2 broadband lines installed so that if one line goes down everyone could just switch to the other line but i am wondering how i can i make sure that we are using both equally. Obvisouly the lines come out of two separate rotuers and go into the server which in turn run in to the switches, but can i have two broadband lines feeding the network without having to have two separate networks???

any ideas and advice would be greatly appreciated

cheers

sam

[efc]

This seems the perfect place to talk about a new product. It is the Tornado Transfer device. You can read more about it here - http://www.thetornado.com/site/product.shtml

Funny video commercial - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-v9DgwMS0

[Curio]

If you only have one server then all the FSMO roles are belong to that server. If you can get identical hardware you can build a second one and then do a mirror of the drive and end up with a clone ready to replace server 1 in case of failure. You could also virtualise the server so it can run as a virtual machine in any hardware.

Adding another server as a DC will also give you some flexibility but as the FSMO roles belong to server1 you still have massive problem if it flips out.

[cash_site]

@Curio, That is a great suggestion !

For the shared Broadband, I think server 2003 has some load balancing applications or perhaps on the Resource Kit. You should will probably need 2 or 3 network cards into the server and then farm out to LAN...

Or.. you could split your zones, and have half the people using 1 broadband, and the other etc

Now.. do you have a Proxy server or ISA2004 etc... dont they have load/sharing capabilities?

[Sambo]

Yeah think i will give curios idea a go, or is it possible to get in the same hard drive and put a mirror on it so i could just swap it over.

Is it vitally important to implement the proxy server, i dont think i have isa2004 but i think your right about the load balancing on server 2003.How could i split my zones without having two different subnets. We are getting in a NAS and i cant configure two ip address for it but it needs to be accessable to the whole network