# My apologies if this is in the wrong section # Hi, I am an administrator for a small business with about 4 clients and currently a windows xp pro machine as a lan server. I have become aware that they will be expanding to a second office. The business is a coach tour operator which has an in-house booking system, which I wrote. With the expansion to the second office the booking system used in the first office will have to be linked to the second office. I'm going to be writing a new version of the booking system as it is 2 years old. My question is would my following idea of linking the two offices IT systems work? I already have a windows 2003 server machine that I bought a few months ago. I was thinking that I could set it up as a domain controller for the two offices, collocate it in a data center and make a subdomain from the website the business has and resolve to it for the DNS lookup on the windows domain. From this running as a domain server I would add the domain to each of the clients in each of the offices then they could logon to the domain and access all the company files and databases. I would need to get this issue of a server cleared up before I begin to write the new booking system as I will run the databases off the server. I would prefer to have the server on a reliable network outside the business premises to prevent downtime if the internet connection goes down, also the internet in the current office has a dynamic IP address and after speaking with the company owner he is reluctant to have the ISP make changes to the internet because it took them a long time to set it up right and the phones are routed through the internet. Could I get some advice on whether this would work and would it be a suitable way to proceed? Kind Regards, Matt I am not a qualified professional so please do tell me if im wrong with my ideas and suggestions.

Sorry but this sounds overly complicated for them to access your app. No additional domain would be required. One forest/domain would be enough. You would be better off setting up a VPN between sites and using RDP [if only two pcs at the remote site] to access the present application. Alternately they could use one of many programs [logmein, hamachi, gotomypc, etc] to do the same via software for remote access via the internet to the server housing your app. Having the server with your app outside of their location has the same failure risk as housing it at their location. It would be better to bring in another internet link from a different provider, to provide ISP failover, then do it off site. Imagine the power of knowing how to internet search http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Teachin...

Since making my original post I have been able to think more logical about it. The main server on the network will house company databases, documents and run an IIS server to handle the application outputs. I am thinking about having the network setup as in this image (http://jayandkaycoachtours.co.uk/images/jaya/vpn.gif). My only issue to making this work would be the dynamic ip address but I was planning on overcoming this by putting the main server in a data centre having each of the sites connect to the server, this is where my thoughts on a domain come in. I have also considered running the databases from my webserver but this is linux and will not support asp files to my knowledge still requiring my xp pro server which I was planning to retire. I am not a qualified professional so please do tell me if im wrong with my ideas and suggestions.