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I went to a Microsoft training session on SBS2008 yesterday. Was very good. I am super excited about some of the cool new features and functionality coming and can’t wait to get my hands on it. We will definitely be doing a server upgrade and switching over to SBS 2008, Exchange server 2007 and Sharepoint Services 3 when we are able to later this year.

Wayne Small, the SBS MVP taking the technical presentations yesterday, posted on his blog that there is a free Visio plugin available that will create a schematic of your network. The Solarwinds LANsurveyor Express plugin is free until 30 June only.

Here are my before and after diagrams. The before is one I made myself, and doesn't include a client PC that is now in my network that was picked up by the auto map maker.

I ran the annual KROSTech 30 hour LAN last weekend. While we have a fair amount of gear that was purchased specifically for the LAN we needed to take some of our home network installation as we had decided to host the the Bathurst spectacular (6 hours of racing) on a Gigabit Network for better performance.

In order to work out how to strip components from home and set up the LAN properly as well as leaving the family with network and intenet connections I used Visio to create my network diagrams. It took me 45 minutes to set this up.
Click the image thumbnails below to see the fullsize network diagrams.

Home network before reorganising. There is redundancy built into this network. What you can see from the diagram is the physical layout of the house and that has made decisions about where switches and the wireless router are located. Most switches can be instantly replaced in case of failure. The tablet is in the media room running Windows Media Centre. It is connected wirelessly and also through a 100Mb wired connection. Gives us portability and stability of connection. The other laptop roams the houe as needed - eg to play games in the dining area or to use as a workstation for extra staff on occasion.