Local Area Network (lan)

A local area network (LAN) is a network that connects computers and other devices in a relatively small area, typically a single building or a group of buildings. Most LANs connect workstations and personal computers and enable users to access data and devices (e.g., printers and modems) anywhere on the network. The hardware components of a LAN consist of: PCs/workstations and serversNetwork Interface Card (NIC)Cabling and connectors, for example, coaxial cable and BNC connector, Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) and RJ-45 connector hub, concentrator, and more complicated network devices such as Bridge, LAN Switch and Router.

Other networking components are used to connect a PC or even a laptop to an Ethernet network. AUI-BNC transceivers can be used to connect a PC or a laptop to a different network interface. Some NIC can support a combination of interface, such as an AUI and a BNC as well as an RJ45. Sometimes a combo transceiver may be used to connect to a NIC on a PC or a laptop on one end and to another network system on the other over the supported interface. Most network interface cards today have PnP (Plug and Play) capability. The following procedures assume that your NIC is PnP-compatible and that your PC’s operating system is Windows® 95. Once the NIC is installed and you have powered on your computer, Windows® 95 will automatically detect the new modem and assist you with its configuration. If this is not the case, refer to the documentation that came with your NIC for proper configuration procedures such as setting IRQ settings.

Internetworking is the practice of connecting a computer network with other networks through the use of gateways that provide a common method of routing information packets between the networks. The resulting system of interconnected networks is called an internetwork, or simply an internet. Internetworking is a combination of the words inter ("between") and networking(connecting). LAN Internetworking: LAN internetworking is the process of connecting one LAN to another or more LANs or WANs through specific devices e.g.: Bridges, Switches, Hubs. Routers. All the devices which are used in LAN are used in internetworking.

The wireless nature of such networks allows users to access network resources from nearly any convenient location within their primary networking environment(a home or office). With the increasing saturation of laptop-style computers, this is particularly relevant.

With the emergence of public wireless networks, users can access the internet even outside their normal work environment. Most chain coffee shops, for example, offer their customers a wireless connection to the internet at little or no cost.

Users connected to a wireless network can maintain a nearly constant affiliation with their desired network as they move from place to place. For a business, this implies that an employee can potentially be more productive as his or her work can be accomplished from any convenient location.

Initial setup of an infrastructure-based wireless network requires little more than a single access point. Wired networks, on the other hand, have the additional cost and complexity of actual physical cables being run to numerous locations (which can even be impossible for hard-to-reach locations within a building).Wireless networks can serve a suddenly-increased number of clients with the existing equipment. In a wired network, additional clients would require additional wiring.

Wireless networking hardware is at worst a modest increase from wired counterparts. This potentially increased cost is almost always more than outweighed by the savings in cost and labor associated with running physical cables.* EhternetIt is inexpensive to form an ethernet based network of computers. The nodes on the Ethernet network have the same privileges and do not follow client-server architecture. It is easy to maintain and troubleshoot the ethernet network. The cables used in ethernet connection are immune to noise and hence the quality of the connection is maintained without any degradation. With the latest versions such as gigabit ethernet and wireless Ethernet (IEEE 802.11ac/11ad) transfer speeds in Gbps have become possible. Minimum hardware requirements For Server: The values below refer to the minimum available hardware required to run Confluence only; for example, the minimum heap size to allocate to Confluence is 1 GB and 1 GB for Synchrony (which is required for collaborative editing). You'll need additional physical hardware, or at least the minimum amount required by your Operating System and any other applications that run on the server. On small instances, server load is primarily driven by peak visitors, so minimum system requirements are difficult to judge. We provide these figures as a guide to the absolute minimum required to run Confluence, and your configuration will likely require better hardware. Here is our minimum hardware recommendation:CPU: Quad core 2GHz+ CPURAM: 6GBMinimum database space: 10GBNote: Please be aware that while some of our customers run Confluence on SPARC-based hardware, we only officially support Confluence running on x86 hardware and 64-bit derivatives of x86 hardware. Confluence typically will not perform well in a tightly constrained, shared environment - examples include an AWS micro.t1 instance. Please be careful to ensure that your choice of hosting platform is capable of supplying sustained processing and memory capacity for the server, particularly the processing-intense startup process. Example hardware specifications these are example hardware specifications for non-clustered Confluence instances. It is not recorded whether the amount of RAM refers to either the total server memory or memory allocated to the JVM, while blank settings indicate that the information was not provided.

When planning server hardware requirements for your Confluence deployment, you will need to estimate the server scalability based on peak visitors, the editor to viewer ratio and total content. The editor to viewer ratio is how many visitors are performing updates versus those only viewing content. Total content is best estimated by a count of total spaces.

Confluence scales best with a steady flow of visitors rather than defined peak visitor times, few editors and few spaces. Users should also take into account: Total pages is not a major consideration for performance. For example, instances hosting 80K of pages can consume under 512MB of memory. Always use an external database, and check out the performance tuning guides.

Data protection has always been a key feature in all of the products our team has produced (in fact we have a dedicated feature team for data protection). The major data protection features we have enhanced or added in Essentials 2012 include:

Storage Spaces is new to Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 and offers a number of compelling scenarios for first-server environments including easy capacity expansion and resiliency for physical disk failures using commodity disk hardware. The ability to simply add a disk drive and increase capacity has long been a request from customers and partners. In Essentials 2012, we have integrated Storage Spaces through wizards and alerts to help make it simple and easy to use.

File History is a new Windows 8 feature that allows you to store changes made to files on your client machine and then easily find and restore previous versions without requiring the assistance of an administrator. In Essentials 2012, we have made it simple for the administrator or partner to configure Windows 8 clients from with the Dashboard to turn on File History and point the File History folder to the Essentials 2012 server. This is a great experience for Windows 8 clients as it provides the added safety of having their File History stored on the server. Microsoft Online Backup Service. Essentials 2012 integrates with the Microsoft Online Backup Service which makes it simple for customers to register their server and perform online backups. This provides an additional layer of protection above local Windows Server Backup mechanisms. Support for backing up 50 client machines. SBS 2011 Essentials had backup support for up to 25 machines. Essentials 2012 doubles this support to 50 machines. We also made some significant performance improvements to client backup.> 2 TB disk support. SBS 2011 Essentials did not support disk drives greater than 2TB for backup and restore. This was a common request from customers (especially from Home Server customers) and we added this in Essentials 2012.

Anywhere Access is a term we use to cover the various ways that customers can access their server, whether they are using a remote PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Major updates and new features in this area include Remote Web Access (RWA). RWA is an existing feature that many of our customers love. In Essentials 2012, we made a number of improvements with one of the biggest being making sure it works well on touch-first devices such as the Windows 8 based touch devices, the iPad and Android tablet devices. RWA now supports HTTP progressive download media streaming from the server in addition to Silverlight media streaming. We have also improved the access to files and folders on the server, allowing an administrator to control which shared folders appear in RWA – an often requested feature in SBS 2011 Essentials.Windows 8 Metro application. We are building a Windows 8 Metro application for accessing Essentials 2012 servers. The existing LaunchPad client app will continue to be available for Windows 8, but we also wanted to build a Windows 8 app that enables users to quickly and easily access and control their server. We are very excited about this app as it allows for some very cool scenarios – especially around people who are traveling and need seamless access to files and folders or media from their server. This is our first client app that supports an off-line mode for people who are remote – another request from partners and customers. In addition, we implemented many of the Windows 8 standard interfaces in our app which allows for a range of new scenarios natively from Windows 8, e.g., simple uploading and searching of files on Essentials 2012. Updated Windows Phone 7 application. We have updated the existing Windows Phone 7 application to work with Essentials 2012 servers – including the ability to access files and folders on the server (this functionality was not available in the previous version). A new Quick Status pane provides information about the state of your server. Remote Connection Monitoring. Essentials 2012 allows administrators to see who is (and has been) remotely connected to the server. Remote domain join. Essentials 2012 allows client machines to join their server without having to be inside the company network. This will make it significantly easier when working with remote users and their machines. Simplified VPN configuration. Essentials 2012 allows customers to quickly and easily configure VPN access to their servers. Client machines are configured with the right connections, allowing users to easily access server resources when they are working remotely on their client machines. Improved SDK extensibility with Web Services. This is more of a developer-facing feature, but we are very excited about the possibilities this opens up. Essentials 2012 has a set of web services that allow developers to write a new set of apps that interact with the server. As an implementation note, we use these services inside the Windows 8 Metro and Windows Phone applications.

In this section, I have listed some of the core infrastructure improvements that we have done in Essentials 2012. Major updates and new features in this area include: Simplified moving past 25 users/50 devices. One of the major pieces of feedback about SBS 2011 Essentials was that once a customer had grown beyond the 25 user limit they had to migrate to Windows Server Standard. After the migration, key SBS-specific features that they had come to depend on (e.g., client backup, Remote Web Access), were no longer available. We wanted to address this issue in Essentials 2012 and so we now allow customers to do an in-place license transition to Windows Server 2012 Standard. After the transition, customers are running Windows Server 2012 Standard without any of the licensing limitations of Essentials 2012, but the majority of Essentials 2012 functionality continues to operate and is fully supported for up to 75 users and 75 devices. (Note that while there are no restrictions placed on the number of users/devices that can be added to a Windows Server 2012 Standard environment, there are maximum supportability limits for the Essentials 2012 features.)Media support. We enabled the core media experiences of Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials on Essentials 2012, which brings the ability to easily share pictures as well as stream video and music from the server. Media on the server can be shared in a number of ways, including DLNA-compliant devices on the server network, Remote Web Access, as well as the Windows Phone 7 client and the Windows 8 Metro client.

The Dashboard is the main UI for administrators. In Essentials 2012, we made a number of changes to make. Dashboard more useful for everyday usage: Making the Home Page more useful. The Essentials 2012 homepage has been redesigned to not only make getting started easier but also more useful after the initial getting started tasks are complete. Home Page will now provide quick status information about the server (e.g. number of users, number of shares, who is connected, etc.) so an administrator or partner can quickly see the state and health of the server. Monitor security and update status for client PCs. Administrators can now quickly see the security setting and Windows update status for client PCs from the Dashboard as well as being able to remotely connect to client machines to fix issues. Servers in the dashboard. Essentials 2012 can now report health and update status of other servers on the network. Supported servers include Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Multipoint Server. Administrators will also be able to initiate a remote desktop session to these servers directly from the Dashboard.

Essentials 2012 has the same extensibility mechanism used in SBS 2011 Essentials which will allow nearly all add-ins built for SBS 2011 Essentials to continue to work with Essentials 2012. We have also exposed Microsoft Pinpoint information directly in the Dashboard to help customers discover useful add-ins for their server.

A major area of flexibility for Essentials 2012 was providing partners and customers with the choice of where they wanted their email service to be located. In SBS 2011 Standard, email was installed and always assumed to be on premises. In SBS 2011 Essentials, we had an add-in for Office 365 connectivity, but no integration was possible with an existing Exchange Server running locally on a second server. With Essentials 2012, there are three deployment options for messaging and collaboration services for which we provide an integrated management experience: On-Premises. Essentials 2012 contains integration with an on-premises Exchange Server running on a second server, which can be either physical or virtual. Office 365. Essentials 2012 builds on the previous Office 365 Integration Module for SBS 2011 Essentials. This option is now part of the core product (no separate download is required) and it allows customers that have an Office 365 account to use this service for their email

Hosted Exchange providers can offer add-ins to Essentials 2012 that will allow customers to select this option. We know that there are many different types of hosted email providers. While we have focused on hosted Exchange email providers, we engineered the product to be email service agnostic which allows non-Exchange based email providers to be integrated through this mechanism (note that this specific feature is not available in the beta).