1. Planning

Before you start, you need to plan. Your plans will become clearer as you progress, and each topic will need it's own planning. You might prefer to plan by reading all the documents, and compiling a list of things as you go.

This version of Raven, uses a new layout As part of this reorganisation, a new "Planning" issue has been added, and a lot of the loose discussion text has been moved here.

A lot of it will be technical (ie relevent), but still of interest. Of course a lot of it won't apply to you, because you are a single home workstation, or because you are part of a multi-site Intranet. You won't find all the answers here, but hopefully you'll find a question or two.

The first thing I planned was the £1500 budget. You will of course have to build your own shopping list (see Raven-Hardware), but do not underestimate the "additional" costs, that you will meet during your first year of use.

In the second year, you will be upgrading, or re-configuring your machine, eg to a new network layout. There will be additional costs, and you may need a second machine (to learn more about networking), but by then you should be able to plan it to meet your requirements and have located a few extras on the cheap (eg find a friend with a second machine, or find one at work).
1.1 Planning and Allocating

1.1
Planning and Allocating

Planning the hardware is a personal thing, I hope the shopping list helps. Remember to allocate it's IRQ's and addresses.

Planning how you split the disk(s) up is also a personal thing. You have to decide what you will need in the future, and how you will progress most easily.

Planning backups, means having a tape as big as your data (unlikely) and having the resources to get at the data if you need to. What happens if the live data on the system has progressed, and cannot be rolled back to as it was 6 weeks ago? Plan to avoid that. Machines are usually "down" whilst a backup takes place, plan for that.

Planning the network, means planning to have a team of cabling people go through your office, preferably once, and have it last for years. It also means allocating IP addresses and names for things.

Planning for users on the network, means allocating them all unique names, and maybe ID's, as well as figuring out who will need access to what (create work-groups for each team). That will effect traffic levels across the network.

If you have a network of machine, you need to allocate login names, host names, IP addresses, email names (etc). If you are a single user, you still have to allocate one of each.

What else needs planning ?