3.1 Choose an administrative plan to meet specified needs, including performance management, account management, and security.

Performance is always a hot issue for discussion. So, let's consider the following situation: If you have a 10BaseT network and have a similar scenario that shown in FTQ 3.1.1, how can you improve the performance?

By increasing the window size, or by utilizing another performance tuning procedure, you will NEVER reduce your network usage by 50%. The only way is to increase the overall network performance is to increase the rating of all the components, not just the cables. For example, a 10BaseT work is rated at 10Mbps. Only implementing the networks that work at more than 20Mbps such as FDDI, ATM, 100BaseT, 100VG-AnyLAN can solve the problem.

Category 5 cable is much less expensive than Fiber Optic cable and it can be used in both 10Base T and 100BaseT networks. If you only replace the cat 3 cable to cat 5 cable or fiber optic, that doesn’t mean your network will be upgraded to 100Mbps or more. To increase the speed of the network, you will need to upgrade to 100BaseT Hub or FDDI or ATM. The rated speed of these new technologies is 100Mbps or more.

You’ve already learned about user-level security and share-level security. You should know the difference between them to be prepared for the questions in this chapter. If you want to choose user level security, you must choose Windows NT as a server. Another thing you should know is that Windows NT server and Windows NT workstation only support user-level security. If somebody asks you which operating system(s) from Microsoft support share-level security, the answer is only Windows 95 and windows for workgroup. You cannot add Windows NT workstation in the answer. If your site has hundreds of computers, you must choose user-level security. If you only have several machines and want less administration work, share-level security is the answer.

Tip: When you see both user-level security and share-level security on the exam answer choices, the answer should be either user-level security or share-level security. Other answers such as server-level security is created by Microsoft to trap and/or confuse you.

We studied LAN performance issues. Now let us talk about WANs. FTQ 3.1.6 shows a general WAN, which utilizes dedicated long-distance high-speed telephone lines to connect networked computers. There are general two ways to connect two sites in WAN environment. One uses dedicated line such as T1, T2, and T3. You need to remember the rated speed of T1, T2, and T3. If you don’t remember, review the chapter 2.5. J

Another solution uses conventional telephone lines. You can combine several telephone line to get higher speed. For example, if you have ten 28.8Kbps modem, you get the speed 10*28.8 = 288Kbps. Some prep testing tools have determined that the answer to the problem is as follows: 10*10*28.8 = 2.88Mbps. They may consider the V.35 technology. However, because V.35 is not included in Microsoft exam outline, NEVER think ten 28.8Kbps modem can provide more than 1Mbps transmission speed in the exam.

Consider that your client has three sites that are far apart. As an example, take the three regional offices of his company, which are in different cities, as shown in FTQ 3.1.6. You could connect the three sites with two T1 links. In such a case, you can use either a bridge or a router. However, if you have three links that form a loop for the topology, as shown in FTQ 3.1.7, you can only use a router. In the event that one line breaks, the rooter will direct the new traffic through the other T1 link. If you have some Nonroutable protocol such as NetBEUI running in your company, you cannot implement the network topology such as in FTQ 3.1.7.

Most company have one T1 link between each site and one analog link for backup, to make certain that if the T1 fails, they can still communicate. The communicate speed will be reduced significantly in case of failure of the T1 link.