Question

Victoria Estate (VIC-RE) is interested in the growing tourism market and open an office to launch services for people who travel on holidays and cannot look after their properties (houses or units) while they are away. This new office currently has 7 employees whose PCs are linked by a small LAN. Each PC shares files and services (such as printing) to the others on the LAN. What type of network model is suitable to build a small LAN for this new office? Describe the advantage and disadvantage of this model.

Answer 1

Since Victoria Estate uses a small LAN to run its business, the most appropriate networking model for this type of system is a Peer-to-Peer networking model.

A peer to peer networking model is an equally distributed network system in which every node(PC) in the system has equal privileges and can access every resource. The workload is distributed evenly among its peers.

Advantages of Peer to Peer networking model:

1. The cost for installing a server is removed as the model uses individual peers to access files and resources.
2. It is most easy to setup.
3. If by any chance any of the peer(PC) fails or is corrupted, it will have no effect to other peers.
4. Every peer can manage their own access privilege to the system.
5. No need for a network operating system.

Disadvantages of Peer to Peer networking model:

1. The resources are not backed up centrally, meaning if a peer fails than all its files and folders will be deleted if it does not have a central backup.
2. Performance issues because of individual users.
3. The security becomes inadequate because every peer manages his/her own access rights.
4. Since it is a decentralized system managing the network becomes hard.

P2P networking model has its own advantages and disadvantages but for a small LAN with limited number of nodes it is the best choice.