Assignment Specification
An international telecommunications company named Vivi20 has recently expanded its business into Australia. The company has established offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane purchased ICT equipment including computers and networking devices, established Local Area Networks (LANs) in these cities, and created connections between these LANs to form a Wide Area Network (WAN) using Telstra as a carrier for data transfer and an Internet Service Provider (ISP). However, the software has not been installed on the servers or the desktop or laptop computers used by employees.
As a Computer System Officer of the ICT Department of the company, you have been asked by the department’s Director to recommend a reliable server operating system for the purchased server computers, as well as relevant software for the desktop or laptop computers used by the company’s employees. After an initial investigation, you have decided to choose a suitable server operating system from among the following:
- Linux (one of the standard Linux distributions)
- NetBSD
- Windows Server
Your next step is to investigate each of these candidates thoroughly to compare their advantages and disadvantages against each other and write a report to the Director to justify your recommendation.
In your report you should consider the following criteria for selecting the right candidate:
- The services provided by these server operating systems (see below for more details)
- The required software by the network clients (i.e. the desktop or laptop computers used by staff) for requesting and accepting the services
- Stability, security, and costs
You are recommended to consider these services provided by a server operating system:
- Web Service
- Application Service
- Communication service (instant messaging, voice and video calls)
- Calendar and Contacts Service
- Compute Service
- File Service
- Print Service
- Database Service
- Email Service
- Media Service (audio and/or video on demand)
- Game service
- Name Service (DNS service)
- Proxy Service (acting as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from the Internet)