Member Avatar for Daywraith

Hi,
I recently started working as the network admin for a smallish research business with around 100-150 employees and about that many computers.

There is currently very little (no) documentation about the network and I have been asked to write up some "official" document, i.e. what machines do what, where they are, what ethernet ports are actually active etc.

The network is a workgroup setup and I don't have passwords to any of the employees machines. I do have admin privileges on the DHCP, DNS and nortain Antivirus server.

Can anyone give me advice on how they would go about mapping the network. What info I should gather how I shoud store it etc. Also as part of this I would like to set up some type of monitoring system that would alert me if a server goes do or if a client starts sending doggy traffic etc.

I have a floor plan for the complex and was think of adding the information about our network on top of that.

Any bright ideas.

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Member Avatar for Suspishio

If you are the Network Admin, your privileges need to be extended to allow password resets for users who have forgotten their passwords. Your journey should start there.

You'll need better than noddy tools (although Network Magic might get you started on mapping the network) in order to monitor traffic and do the rest of the admin stuff including the setting of policies.

Your company will, IMO, need to invest in proper tools and the BMC website provides a professional toolset for this. (I am in no way connected with BMC).

150 employees is more than enough risk to the business for proper tools to be acquired.

Member Avatar for Daywraith

It would be an extremely hard battle for me to convince the employees that I should have the ability to reset there passwords. I'm in a workgroup not a domain remember. Besides even with NTFS it's fairly trivial to bypass windows XP user passwords and reset them. Haven't had to do it on Vista yet anyone know if they have made it harder?

Will check out Network Magic and have a look into BMC, doubt I will be able to convince them to buy anything.

thanks for the reply

Member Avatar for jbennet

on vista theres a network map under control panel. To get XP clients to show in it you have to download a driver from microsoft

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922120

worked for me, showed all my clients + UpNP devices like router and NAS

Member Avatar for Daywraith

Cool thanks,
Unfortunately I won't be able to install the XP drivers on all the machines but it certainly sounds like a useful function.

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