CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET

Access for everyone: Networking.
Beyond the basic advantages of sharing applications, storage space and hardware resources, your network can also serve as a conduit for data from the World Wide Web. The distance between connecting all the students and teachers in one building to linking several school LANs by high-speed data lines into a district Wide Area Network (WAN) to linking the whole district to the Internet is surprisingly short. It's all a matter of making the connections and putting the right equipment in place to transmit, translate and filter Internet data.

Getting wired.
As your data needs grow, think about the capacity of the wires that connect student workstations, and ultimately your main data feed. For your internal wiring, you have a choice of 10 or 100 MB capacities in cables that can utiIize Ethernet (a protocol that defines how data will be moved through the cable) and can invest in fiber optic cabling for high capacity connections between network segments. And don't forget the additional hardware you need to make those internal connections work. Hubs allow many PCs to link to a single relay station, which can then pass data back and forth between your PCs and servers (and eventually to the Internet) over a single wire. These hubs define the segments of your network, and can be linked by fiber optic trunks (high-capacity pipes sometimes referred to as backbones) to help you quickly pass data traffic between floors of a building or across other physical boundaries.

Now let's look at the connection between your network and the outside world. How will you connect to your local Internet service provider? Will you want to lease part or all of a T1 or T3 line for maximum data throughput? That will probably be the case if you are investing in connections for more than one location, such as in a district Wide Area Network, or WAN. If so, you'll need to invest in some more equipment to translate between data transmission formats and help you manage access to the 'Net. These lines have high capacities that would quickly overwhelm any PC directly connected to them. To step down the data flow rate to a speed your network can handle, you'll have to provide special flow regulators called Channel Service Units/Data Service Units (CSU/DSUs) between your ISP and district and between district and school to keep from 'bursting' those data pipes.

Long-distance links.
When your technology plan serves more than one campus or building, some extra hardware and cabling is necessary to get the job done. How do you connect every student in a multi-school district to the Internet? Let's take a look at that connection, and then trace the data back from this District location to PCs in the more remote schools.

Piping in the data.
Many ISPs would recommend that you bring all of your data into one location, then distribute the data from primary connection point out to your other schools. T1 and T3 lines are frequently used for high-speed data transmission between networks. These speedy connection lines can be leased from your local telephone company (and in some cases, your Internet service provider) to move data from the Internet to your district and from your district to outlying schools. As an added bonus, they handle both voice and data traffic, so you may be able to realize a cost savings on telephone services by running both voice and data over the same set of inter-school links.

Data management.
Throughout your network, from the district level to remote sites, servers can help your students and staff make the most of the Internet. Servers perform similar roles in interacting with the Internet that they perform as managers of your internal network. The size and specifications of your servers are largely contingent on many factors such as the number of users, future growth expectations, network band width, applications, required storage and availability requirements, to mention a few.

For proxy server and electronic mail management, investing in servers that provide the highest level of scalability features such as additional hard drives, processors and memory as well as data backup features and RAID is the best approach. RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) allows you to add redundancy and performance with a set of smaller drives instead of using one large drive to store all of your data. By striping or mirroring data across multiple drives and then adding redundancy, you can get the highest performance and fault tolerance, allowing for the loss of a drive while continuing to operate with access to all of the data. Not only will these scalability features provide the flexibility to expand within a growing network environment, it will also help optimize the total cost of owning and operating your network over the life of the products. The amount and configuration of servers you need to manage your Internet access depends upon the applications you want to run; there are no hard and fast rules.

Filtering and access control.
Finally, you'll need to protect students and network alike from viruses, unauthorized access and inappropriate content. Your school or district can use proxy servers and firewalls to help control the type of data requested and protect from viruses or tampering, respectively.

Bringing it all together.
No single article can give you all of the information you need to connect to the World Wide Web. However, now that you've been introduced to some of the key technologies involved in making the Internet connection, you've made the first step towards opening new worlds of learning for your district's students. And beyond the learning experience, open up a whole new potential for transformational change.

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