Help required with an assignment

Walletwatch

Hi

I was wondering if I could get some help out here with an assignment I need to complete. I have four tasks with sets of questions that I need to answer, one of them being mentioned below as an illustration. I need the response in 350-400 words per question to complete the assignment. Would appreciate any help I can get on this...

Task 1

Matthew is the network administrator for Payroll Is Us (PIU), a North American payroll company specializing in custom payroll solutions for companies with 1,000 or more employees. Security is a major issue at PIU—physical security, that is. The company has locks on the doors and uses guards with guns and armor-plated trucks. However, to this point, their network security has been rather lax. A survey of the 500 employees indicates that many have not changed their password since the day they were hired, and many have the password “password,” which is the default for new accounts. Even the Administrator password for the domain is easy to remember (and guess): “payroll.” What has really brought this issue to a head is the apparent leak of confidential information from the company’s databases and from people’s network shares. Confidential memos are being referred to in the newspaper, and PIU’s clients are getting calls from businesses that seem to know how many employees they have and what those employees’ salaries are (more than a little disconcerting for the clients and the management of PIU). They think that access to this data is coming primarily from people on the outside hacking into the corporate network using passwords that have been guessed. Your job is to tighten security. At this point, the security needs to focus on passwords and auditing, but you will be given more latitude to make further changes if you prove to be successful at this task.

Analyze in depth and provide a solution what need to be modified regarding passwords and critical files.

albertross_2

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/directory/activedirectory/stepbystep/strngpw.mspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(networking)

Walletwatch

Thanks a lot Albatross.. you are a lifesaver !!! This is exactly the kind of pointers I need, I can obviously build on these and draft the final answers to these questions. I have three other tasks for which assistance of this kind will most certainly get me home.

My other tasks are:

Task 2:

Words, Words, Words, Inc. is a publishing company whose primary business is to reprint classic works of literature. As a result, much of what they produce is stored in digital form on servers. They have a local area network with five Windows 2000 servers performing print and file services.
They have called you in to resolve two problems. The first problem relates to five high-speed printers they purchased last year. Four of these printers were purchased for the document processing departments and are used to print draft copies of books they are reformatting for print. All four of these printers are located centrally in the building and are readily accessible by all departments. The fifth printer is used by the accounting and human resources departments to print administrative documents and reports. The four production departments cooperate quite well, and because the various production schedules are not the same, when one printer is not being heavily utilized by one department, people from another will redirect their print jobs to that printer. The problem is that only some of the production employees understand how to redirect print jobs (most of them just click the Print button), and those who do sometimes accidentally send large jobs to the administration printer. You have been asked to resolve the problems related to redirecting jobs from printer to printer and to prevent jobs from being sent to the administrative printer by unauthorized users. The second issue has to do with confidential information that is held on some of the print servers. Although most of the documents are accessible by everyone, some are confidential, and access to those needs to be restricted.
Company managers understand that you can prevent remote access to files by not sharing them, but they want security against access by some of the people who can get local access to the servers. Some users who perform delegated administrative duties (but who are not full-blown administrators) have rights to log onto the servers, and they have been caught browsing through confidential information. The company wants to put an end to this.

Analyze the scenario above and make recommendations what needs to be modified in terms of configuration of the printers as well as restricting access to confidential information.

Task 3:

Emilio is the sole proprietor of a small home-based Internet consulting company called WebCrazy. He has a dedicated Internet connection, and he hosts his own Web page and those of some of his clients on a Web server running Windows 2000 Server, which is located in his basement. In addition, he has three other computers on a LAN in a workgroup configuration. Of these, one is a laptop on which he does most of his development; it runs Windows 2000 Professional. One computer is a test machine that he frequently formats and reinstalls. The other computer is one his family uses; it runs Windows 98. Emilio knows that being able to recover data in the event of a hard drive crash is essential. Therefore, he purchased a 4mm DAT drive for his server. What he is unsure of is how to back up all the data on his server, laptop, and family machine from a single location—if that is possible at all. He also wants to know the recommended frequency for his backups and how many tapes he needs. He has called you to look over his network and advise him on a strategy.

The following results must be completed:
A. Devise a way to back up all Emilio’s critical data.
B. Make sure the backup strategy allows for storage on a single tape drive. Emilio does not want to buy more hardware.
C. Make sure a clear schedule is devised that will provide for the most up-to-date backups with the least amount of inconvenience to Emilio.

Carefully analyze the scenario above. Review the requirements and provide solution for each of the tasks.

Task 4:

Claudio is the administrator of a Windows 2000 network. He manages five Windows 2000 servers, one of which functions as a file server for three departments. Lately, he is faced with two separate problems. First, a research library was just put into the building. It has two computers running Windows 2000 Professional, and users can log into them while they are doing research. They are automatically connected to a home directory on the server where the users can create documents based on their research findings. However, the users are finding that, when they move from the computers in their offices to the research computers, they have to reset their desktops, and if they create a shortcut on their office computers, they have to create the same shortcut on the research machines. The users are asking for a solution to this problem.
The second issue is one that the users are not complaining about (yet), but that is becoming a problem for Claudio. The users’ home folders are stored on the file server. He periodically checks storage use and finds that some users are consuming a disproportionate amount of hard drive space on the server. In addition, this space usage is increasing dramatically over time. When he investigates, he finds that many users are downloading quite a large quantity of game demos and pictures, and these items are creating most of the storage consumption.
Claudio wants to be able to provide for the ongoing storage needs of the users while enforcing an upper limit on the amount of space any one user can consume. He also wants to be able to separate each department so that if the users in one department consume the maximum amount of space, that will not overrun the free space available to the users in another department. He currently has two hard drives with capacities of 10GB and 20GB, and he would like to allocate 10GB to each department.
You have been called in to analyze this situation and make recommendations.

Analyze in details any requirements needed and provide a solution to help Claudio.

albertross_2

Wasn't this covered in the lectures or course notes?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=windows+2000+group+rights&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=windows+2000+printer+rights&btnG=Search&meta=

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=backup+schedules&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=backup+cycle+grandfather&btnG=Search&meta=

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=disk+quota&btnG=Search&meta=

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=windows+2000+roaming+profiles&btnG=Search&meta=

Walletwatch

Thanx a ton... as for the classes, joined the course late and had to take leave due to having fallen ill during the course.. not wanting to make it sound like a sob story, also it is not that I am not to blame for not having been a little more careful to prepare for these quizzes and assignments.. am now faced with the ominous task of having to do multiple assignments, so doing the legwork on most of it myself, and requesting for help on those that I know I am hopeless on :-(

Thanks a lot, mate... ur help definitely goes a long way in me having saved my course certificate...

browolf

"pretexting" somewhat relevant to that first one too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretexting