RSolberg's questions

I have 5 offices 2 having 10 employees each and the other 3 having 2 each. Each of my offices will be connected to each other with fortinet products (within the month). I want files to be locked when someone else has it open, so the idea of pushing copies of the same files out to 5 locations isn't attractive.

My hope is to use the new file server solution to not only host all of the business files, but to backup key server and database data to it and then also duplicate this data to an offsite location such as Amazon s3 or other.

I just don't know if I'm describing a NAS or a physical server or a netbook pc with an attached USB drive...

Is it possible to separate the email hosting for my domain into a couple of different hosts?

For example company.com has emails going to Google (apps for business) and Microsoft Online Services (exchange). Employee A's inbox is at Microsoft online services as [email protected] while Employee B's inbox is at Google as [email protected].

I just launched my first IIS FTP site following many of the tutorials from IIS.NET... I'm using IIS Users and Permissions rather than anonymous and/or basic.

This is what I'm seeing while trying to establish the connection...

Status:    Resolving address of ftp.mydomain.com 
Status:    Connecting to ###.###.##.###:21... 
Status:    Connection established, waiting for welcome message... 
Response:  220 Microsoft FTP Service  
Command:   USER MyFTPUser  
Response:  331 Password required for MyFTPUser. 
Command:   PASS ********************  
Response:  530 User cannot log in. 
Error:     Critical error 
Error:     Could not connect to server

I just recently launched a new "cloud server" with GoGrid and would like to setup and use FTP for deploying web applications and web sites to the server directly. What is the process of setting up the FTP built into IIS for this server for each site that is hosted, etc.?

I just launched my first server with go-grid (cloud). Its a 2GB instance running Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) version. I've installed the IIS components that I'll need along with SQL Express 2008 for the websites that I'll be hosting on there.

I'm a developer by trade and server hardening/security are completely foreign to me. What are the things that I should do next to improve the security on the server?

In Vista (business edition), how can you view who the local admins are on the PC without the user being an admin? Any command prompt method etc.?

I've been asked to create a website that can identify the user's country and then route them to a specific site that was designed specifically for that country. While this task in itself is not terribly difficult using some Google API's, I'd like to know what the industry standard is for domains and different countries.

As of now, each country has their own domain name and it at times is a sub-domain on a larger site.

These are the options I've come up with, but would like to try and preserve brand image first and foremost and a single brand message is key to doing so. In bold is the domain name with the redirect that would occur based on country and potentially language preferences.

mydomain.com
1. mydomain.us
2. mydomain.ca
3. mydomain.mx

mydomain.com
1. mydomain.com/us/en/
2. mydomain.com/ca/en/
3. mydomain.com/ca/fr/
4. mydomain.com/mx/en/
5. mydomain.com/mx/sp/

My father runs a small business and has had a growing concern about some of the web activity for a couple employees. He's asked that we have a way to report the activity, but its a bit over my head. Probably the most important part of this is that it is for a "small business" (less than 15 employees) and whatever the solution is would need to be cheap, but effective.

Any recommendations for this?

EDIT
The budget needs to be in the $250 to $500 ball park. If the only options out there are all $1500, that would require some value proposition questions by the owner/father. So cheap is always better, but effective.

The office basically consists of a single server with 10 laptops/pcs. The server acts as the domain controller, application host (IIS stuff), SQL Server, exchange, etc. We do have a CISCO "PIC" device that is used as a firewall.

Is there a way to schedule a job on Windows Server 2003 [small business edition] that will create a backup of a SQL 2005 Express DB?

I'm not sure if there is a native job/process for this on SQL Express or not. If there is not, how would I go about creating one?