Huffman Trucking Paper

Huffman Trucking Paper

Sedrick Haulding

Alicia Pearlman

After viewing the network topology, one can quickly see that The Huffman Trucking Company uses a wide range of operating systems which all seem to serve their own purpose. One may also notice that the operating systems vary from site to site as well as the way the site communicates with the outside world. First, the plant sites will be examined, outlining the similarities and the difference. Lastly, I will discuss the office locations and provide the same information about all.

With four plant sites in all, it is clear to see why the Huffman Trucking Company chose the operating system they did. The majority of the plant sites are using thin clients or dummy workstations with a Windows mobile device being used as a scanner. The Windows based handhelds make since in this case because most plant workers are mobile or require more than usual movement. It is cost efficient to have Wyse devices and handhelds as an alternative to workstations with a full blown Windows operating system. The Los Angeles plant appeared to have taken a different direction with the operating systems used there. There are full workstations that utilize Windows 98 and Windows dos machines and no handhelds in the environment. It can only be assumed that this location doesn’t require as elaborate tasks as the other plant locations. The full workstations with obsolete operating system can only perform limited tasks even compared to the thin clients and Windows based handhelds.

The office sites of the Huffman Trucking Company appear to have some commonalities as well. In most sites, the marketing team are using Mac workstations which do a better job with resource management and rendering graphically intensive tasks. The accounting and human resource departments use Windows 2000 which is uniform across all office sites. They used this operating system because of the robust ability to create and access file shares more...