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Designing a Network

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by ashok_g

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Hi
I have been ask to redisgn network for a School. Currently they have 6 computer labs with 20 to 30 computers in each lab. They are looking on to putting another 4 more labs with 30 computers in each lab. Thay also have 15 in library, 20 in teaching staff room and 15 in lectuer and tutorial rooms. This number could grow as student no grows.

When they design current network, it was done on patch up basis(on need basis) and they move server room here and there. what they have now is every floor has a main switch where all labs are connected and that main switch is connected to switch on server room. They have Giga bit Switch on server room and all the switches has gigabit uplink with CAT5e cable connecting each other. what i can see is backbone is very much conjusted.

Client side they have mix of windowsNT/2000/XP and server side Main DCs are of windwsNT4.0 and they have file and other server of winds2000 and 2003 servers.

What do they do?
-> Most of the softwars are installed on local computer.
-> Users are loging in and out from any computer from any lab and accessing their centralize files/web/email servers.
-> They are also looking at running couple of Terminal server for student and staff to access certain softwares and files.
-> They have cetralize(shared) printer with one print server running.
-> They currently have two DC(windows NT4.0), one of them being DHCP(no subnet), Local DNS, Local Win server for external web pages and so they use ISP's DNS server.
-> They have one file server for student but I am looking at NAS product(pleas advice) to replace this server.
-> Switches they are using are mix (Dlink, Netgear, Ecom so on)

What is my goal?
-> Need to redisgn whole network such a way that network is faster,effecient and reliable.

Question
-> how could we redisgn this network so that we could achiev above goal?

Note:- Please feel free to share your experience with the products(e.g. NAS, Servers, Switches as well).

8 replies

by pgm554

Ditch the NT.Any type of WINS service sucks and adds uneeded network traffic to the network .

Go see the boys at Novell academic licensing and replace the M$ garbage servers with a Novell 6.5
iSCSI cluster(no need for NAS).
With 6.5 licensing is per user,not per server.

(I.E.)With have a 500 user license you can have as many file servers as you have need for.

It comes out of the box with a 2 server cluster license.

Supports up to 32 processors per box.

Cheaper,more relable,MUCH less prone to hacking and viruses.

Or drop in a couple of Linux boxes with Novell services for Linux .250,000 user license on top of a very cheap(RedHat,Debian,SuSE)distribution.
Better ,faster ,cheaper.

by whatme?

Since you already have NT, W2, and W3, I would stick with windows for ease of use and learning curve. Update your DCs to W3k, assign subnets to certain areas of importance and OU's to your others and then group policies to smaller user bases. Your question is kind of open with a lot of "what ifs". I would be happy to email you with what I think would be ideal. Let me know if You want me to.

by ashok_g

Thank you for your reply but simply ditching windows will not be the answer, it will create more problem than the solution.

I will be more than happy to receive your email Mervin and will appreciate if you could do that.

Thank you again

by alpha.barry

I have been asked to design and implement a network for a company with locations in four cities. Three of the locations will beconnecte using lease-line serial link The fourth location will be connected using Frame Relay, because of cost consideration.

The company has previously used RIP version 2in this location and wishes to continue using it for now. However, the three locations willuse OSPF, so RIP must be redistributed into the OSPF routing process.

VLAN, DHCP, and NAT are to be implemented.

by 3pdegeiso

Ensuring that the network has a scaleable design is important for providing the bandwidth needed. You have to understand what your design requirements are first. A protocol analyzer such as Ethereal or Sniffer Pro should be used to perform a network baseline at key points in the network. You need to understand the approximate aggregate bandwidth that each lab will need to be allocated. The access layer equipment (closet switches) should have enough uplink bandwidth to the server room switches (distribution layer/core layer in Cisco speak).

Once the bandwidth to the center of the network is determined, there must be enough bandwidth from the server network to service all of the requests from the classroom labs. A larger, high performance layer 3 capable switch should do the job (i.e. Cisco 5500/6500).

There are other factors to consider including cost, redundancy/high availability, etc.

Broadcast traffic should be minimized using properly configured WINS, DHCP, DNS technologies where appropriate. The protocol analysis will tell you how much of your traffic is broadcast. Pay attention to how much of the traffic is web based. Is anyone abusing bandwidth with peer-to-peer file sharing apps (KaZaa, iMesh, etc.) You would be suprised how much bandwidth can be reclaimed by good protocol management.

So there isn't a specific design in my answer, there are many details that need to be ironed out for your situation. Good luck!

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