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by jellimonsta

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Hey!, I inherited a corporate network from someone who seemed to have the foresight of Mr. Magoo.
We are a relitavely small shop really, 15 servers, 2 domains, 200 workstations, 30 remote users and a mess of printers. Being as we are a manufacturing facility in a customer driven market, I think it is safe to assume we will not see too rapid a growth pattern in the near future.
This is mind, the company network was set up as a class A network, the server room consisted of mainly PC class systems and the network devices were mainly 10MB hubs.
I have replaced most of the hubs (gradual process as the company does not have a large IT budget)with 10/100 switches, as with the PC class systems have been replaced with server systems.
The one thing I did not change was the class A network. No matter how hard I try to imagine I just cannot picture us having 16 million nodes, so I really think something should be done about the subnetting here.
My dilema is this; I perform both Network Admin and PC support to this environment so I do not have a lot of time outside of trouble shooting and maintaining the network. What actions would you wise ones recommend to make this network more practical causing as little down time and pain as possible?
I would like to configure VPN's but we only have a few Cisco switches so I cannot go that route yet.
Any suggestions?

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by ghstinshll

I sure hope this is a private Class A scheme, rather than a public, paid for Class A block!

If you're going to do it, start by creating your subnets (you have whatever freedom you want). I'd make them relatively large since you have the room, or decide on a Class B instead-that will still give you rather large subnets. Anyway...

Create a Subnet chart of all your subnets and design it the way you'd like to have it, with your DHCP scopes in one subnet, server statics in one, printer IPs inone, etc...

I'm assuming all your devices are using IPs from your class A that you'll be dividing up, but are only using the first few addresses, etc... If so, you should already have the network that will suppoort you changing things around without penalty, etc.. Then go around and change things one step at a time, according to your chart, so that you documentation stays current through the whole process. Then you can work on some VLANs afterward, adn you'll be sitting pretty well organized...

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