Occasionally I like to look back at some of the things I’ve done as a consultant as a reminder of the cool stuff that can happen with Macs. It’s educational just to recall all the different scenarios and how they were made to work.
One time I supported a 45 user company in the pre-press business, a graphic arts concern. They were hired by a large, very well known company to do their pre-press work which meant growing the company by about 50 new employees. This meant planning, budgeting, ordering, and installing workstations and servers to meet this new demand.
We had some weeks in the planning process before doing the installations, which happened in a 30-day period.
We ordered 30 G4 wind tunnel Macs, 15 Dell workstations, 2 Xserves, 1 terabyte RAID, a 20 cartridge DDS library backup system, plus new ethernet switches, a Watchguard firewall and Adobe, Office and miscellaneous software. Spent about 145k.
The network environment had the working files hosted live on grey G4 towers with ultra-scsi drives. We migrated this data to an XServe connected to the new RAID via fiber optic.
I set up a new Extensis Font Reserve server for hosting fonts for the entire company. Retrospect server was installed on a spare PC to run the library backup system.
The Watchguard Firefox was installed. I loved this box because it would display firewall activity and connections in real time on a piece of software running on a PC.
Then we had to get all the software installed, get the users up and running and the network configured. After that was all done, the hard stuff began.
The new client wanted to bring in a T1 private line so the graphic artists would connect to their private pre-press system via this new bandwidth. A new Cisco was delivered and placed on the Watchguard’s DMZ port. A static route was configured to the Cisco and all was good.
But wait, more had to be done. The graphic artists used a browser to connect to the client’s web servers, which used an authentication module at the front-end. This module was dependent on successful DNS resolution to work correctly.
Since it was a private T1 line, the servers on the far end did not resolve correctly. The IP addresses were all private, non-routable addresses. So, we installeda DNS server on 24-hour notice to provide DNS resolution so that computers on the LAN could resolve these private servers to domain names correctly.
It all worked! One of the highlights of my consulting experiences.
