You are an eager new networking consultant, and a school district has hired you for your first consulting job.
Currently, the district has no links between its buildings. School personnel share files by transferring CDs and diskettes between the buildings. The district is putting in new school management software for student and financial records. The software requires that the buildings be networked together.
That district has a grade school, junior high, and high school. The grade school and the junior high are smaller buildings on the same plot of land but they are in separate buildings about 50 yards apart. The high school is newer and larger; it is several miles away on the other side of town.
The school district has teachers, principals, administrative assistants, staff members, and many students. The instructor will email each of you your custom design requirements at end of Week 6
Security is always an issue. The school offers courses in computer science at the high school. The principal is concerned that the students will be tempted to hack into the school management software. The superintendent requests a security plan to help prevent student hackers from accessing the school management software. Also, the superintendent has a vague worry about students accessing pornography on the Internet. The district would like to know if you can configure routers and/or switches to prevent this. Or, is extra equipment or software needed to prevent students from accessing pornography from school computers?
The school district has 24 teachers, 12 principals, 16 administrative assistants, 14 staff members, and 1100 students.
Here are your design criteria:
The principals and the administrative assistants must be on their own network. The teachers and the staff must be on their network. The students must be own their own network and an internal firewall should be placed between the students and everything else.
The address space you have been given is 10.2.0.0 /16
You must allocated IP addresses as efficiently as possible as the school expects to grow. You will have to use VLSM to accomplish this goal.
The school superintendent bought some equipment and then realized that no one knew how to make it work. The equipment includes one 2600 series router, two 2500 series routers, and six 1900 series switches.
Your mission: Design a network to connect the three buildings and recommend security features for this network. You will plan your solution step by step, and then present your overall design to your client.
These questions should help you when creating this design.
- How many IP addresses will you need to have available for assignment in each subnetwork?
- What interfaces (router ports, PCs, management ports on switches, etc) will require IP addresses?
- How will you provide separation between students’ computers and those of the faculty/administrators?
- Is there duplication or overlap in your IP addressing scheme?
- Does an IP address on one interface of a router have a different network part than an IP address on another interface on the same router?
The network diagram should contain the following:
- A network address and subnet mask for each different network.
- An IP address and subnet mask for each interface on a router.
- A range of IP addresses and a gateway for computers on each network.


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