Managing Servers

[pedritobrown]

Can you all help solve this case study. You are employed as an IT System Engineer for company ABC. Your responsibility is to manage 150 servers from a central location lets say Curacao. the servers are in South America, North America, Canada and the UK, Brussels.

How would you manage these servers from Curacao hosting several OS and applications. ABC is an online gaming company. How would you solve this case. Please tell me

[NightWalker]

I would have a router at each site configured with a VPN to the central site so data can travel between sites securely. If all the servers run a windows OS use Remote Desktop to administer them. If you have Unix or Solaris servers you would need something like the HP Integrated Lights Out solution (depending on compatible server hardware), this would allow you to administer any OS remotely across an IP network, there is a remote console feature that’s like being sat at the server, even though the server could be on another continent or in the room down the hall.

[Methodman85]

Wouldn't VPNs through firewalls be a better solution?
Configuring Pix or Checkpoint firewalls at each site?

[NightWalker]

There would definitely need to be firewalls in there somewhere, don’t want to give the world access to your servers!

[Methodman85]

Aren't connections these days configured directly at the firewall? VPN from firewall to firewall?
Or is it a connection between the routers behind the firewalls?

[ffreeloader]

Use ssh. If you must have a gui, use something like tightvnc tunneled over ssh. It works great, is cross-platform, and tunneled over ssh you have secure connections.

[NightWalker]

Originally Posted by Methodman85

Aren't connections these days configured directly at the firewall? VPN from firewall to firewall?
Or is it a connection between the routers behind the firewalls?

It all depends on the kit you have, it can be done either way.