Unit 44 Local Area Networking Technologies Assignment Brief

Objective

This coursework is designed in the form of set questions and design scenario. The tasks are divided into five sections, with section compromising several questions. The coursework should be submitted as one document in a report format.

Assignment Scenario:

You are working for IT Support and Services Company. You are assigned with a project of designing a complete LAN technology solution for one of your clients. Dot.edu College is a private college with more than 5000 students and five branches within UK. They are planning to open a new head office in Central London and have other branches in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. It has a centralised distributed database system for the students’ details. You are required to provide a complete Local Area Networking solution for their head office in London.
The head office will comprise of the following departments:

• Customer Service: Customer Service area has 5 computers where students can approach for assistance related to their attendance and progress or any other academic related issues.
• Accounts/Finance: This department has 34 computers and a network printer and have access to only those working in finance department.
• Library: With 200 computers, the library will be divided in two rooms each of which will contain 100 devices including a network printer, the Library needs to be an isolated network as the student will be allowed to use it for their study purpose. They should also be able print to a network printer from these machines.
• Server Area: A control room with all the servers for the College. File Server, Web Server, Domain Controller are located in this area
• Web Services: It hosts the college’s intranet services. Students can log on to this server to get the information about their account, their attendance, progress and other study related materials.
• Domain Services: Keeps the record of all the users and their access right and permission. Create, edit and delete student and staff details.

The college will be using private IP address 192.168.0.0/16 within LAN and they will be using Network Address Translation (NAT) or Port Address Translation (PAT) for accessing outside network.
For the college availability of the service and security of the personal and financial data is very important. At the same time, it must be financially viable. So they asked you to come up with a complete network design and implementation strategy that will guarantee the scalability, security and availability of the devices and resources within the network.

Task 1: Understand the impact of LAN technologies

1. Identify and explain different LAN Technologies available in the market. Explain different LAN technology in relation to the scenario above. [P1.1]
2. What do you understand by quality of service (QoS) and bandwidth management? Evaluate and analyse with examples why do you think it is important to perform QoS and Bandwidth Management? [P1.2, M1]
3. Discuss LAN concerns in terms of network security, availability and performance? explain how a Hierarchical Network Design can improve on availability, security, scalability and performance [P1.3, D1]

Task 2: Be able to design LAN infrastructures

1. Design network infrastructure to fulfill the requirement of above scenario, including the diagram of the network infrastructure, and all devices (ie. Switches, routers, cables, etc.)? [P2.1, M2]
2. Critically evaluate the suitability of network components in your design in terms of [P2.2, D2]

• Security
• Scalability
• Availability

Task 3: Be able to implement LAN infrastructures

1. Draw a complete LAN design including servers, connecting devices, workstations, peripherals, etc. for the above scenario. Please include the configuration scripts in the appendix. [P3.1,D3]
2. Prepare a list of IP addresses, subnet IDs, Broadcast IDs for each department, Justify your choice for chosen techniques (VLSM or others)? [P3.2, M3]
3. What different technologies can be used in order to keep the resources and devices secure in the above network? Justify your choice of technology (e.g. Access Control Lists, Port Security, VLANs etc.) for implementation in the above network. [P3.3]
4. The IT director asked you to review and test the LAN, prepare a test case form so that the performance, availability and security of the proposed network can be tested. [P3.3]

Task -4: Be able to manage LAN infrastructures

1. Create a performance baseline for the above company network and evaluate the designed LAN [P4.1,M3]
2. There are many tools available in the market to monitor the performance of a network, choose one and produce a performance monitoring report for your network. [P4.2]
3. One of the computers used in the library replaced, plan a step by step process to connect the new computer to the network and test connectivity effectively and efficiently? [P4.3]