Background Information for the Campus Network Design Project XUMUC is large
Background Information for the Campus Network Design Project XUMUC is large online university in the Eastern United States. The university has an enrollment of 90,000 students, mostly online. The students do not live on campus and are scattered around the globe. XUMUC offer courses in the fields of arts and humanities, business, social sciences, mathematics, computer science, the physical sciences, and health sciences. Many of the professors are working professionals with jobs in the business community, and only 5% of the 3000 faculty have offices on main campus. Due to opening of new online universities in the DC metropolitan area, the university has had difficult time attracting new students. The college wishes to attract and retain more students, many of whom leave the state to attend more prestigious colleges. Because of these reasons and others, the State advisory board expanded the Shady Grove campus of XUMUC. Nine states colleges open their branches at Shady Grove location. XUMUC’s management board now wishes to consolidate management functions at its Shady Grove location. The president of XUMUC formed an Advisory Group whose mission was to consolidate IT functions and implement state of the art network to attract prospective students. The Advisory Group was also to determine why prospective students do not select XUMUC. The group determined that many prospective students do not select XUMUC because they perceive the computer facilities at XUMUC to be inadequate. In addition to the computer applications used by the students and professors, the college administration personnel use the College Management System, which is a Novell NetWare client/server application that keeps track of class registrations and student records. The Current Network at Shady Grove Campus: The Shady Grove campus hosts 9 independent universities working independently. The campus has three main buildings and fiber optic cable is used for backbone connections. The campus diagram is shown below. Each building is connected by fiber optic cable. Because most of the students that attend XUMUC do so on a part-time basis, and because much of the faculty have other jobs, the assumption in the past has been that many of the students and professors use computing resources at home or at work and do not depend on the XUMUC network. The current network is shown in Figure -1. Fig:-1 All the LANs at this site use 10-Mbps Ethernet although they can be upgraded to 100 Mbps. Every building is equipped with Category-5 cabling and wall plates in the various offices, classrooms, and labs, though the cabling and wall-plates are not used in some of the buildings. To support users in Building-3, multi-mode fiber-optic cabling was pulled through cabling conduits to Building-1 and Building-2. At the Shady Grove campus, XMUC uses the services of 4 ISPs for internet connections. The college provides 10 Macintoshes and 25 PCs in the Computing Center (in Building-1) for student use. A LAN switch in the Computing Center connects hubs, servers, printers, and the router that connects to the Internet. Shady Grove campus does not have its own web server. For security, packet filtering firewall is used on some routers. The routers have default routes to the Internet and do not run routing protocols. Based on the advice of the Community Advisory Group, the president started the “Upgrade XUMUC Project” with the goal of upgrading the computer and networking facilities. The three network administrators and the Director of Operations for XUMUC formed the Project Task Force. Table:-1 Shady Grove Inventories Subnets Devices Comment UMUC 20 Work Stations UMES 8 Work Stations UMCPTowson 8 Work Stations Towson 4 Work Stations UB 5 Work Stations UMB 15 Work Stations Eastern Shore 4 Work Stations UMBC 12 Work Stations Bowe 5 Work Stations Class Rooms 150 Work Stations Shady Grove Administrations 50 Application server, Data server, and SAN Router 4 2600 series, Slow processing power Switches 10 switches All switches are without port security. No technology to reduce convergence time. Patch Panel 4 Hubs 5 Printers 5 Commercial Type in Copy Centre Network Printers and departments Printers 25 Voice Network: Shady Grove campus has 200 telephones on a separate voice network. IP telephony is used for internal purpose. PSTN (Phone Company) network is used to dial out. The logical diagram is shown below Security: The site recently experienced an increase in network attacks (DoS). The network was recently unavailable for a considerable time because of an attack. IT staff suspects that these attacks are coming from broad range of spoofed IP addresses, but unable to prevent these attacks. They have suggested installing NID so that they can monitor better and stop it while it is happening. Network availability is crucial for the university, because their revenue depends on availability of network. Web server: The director of the site wants to host a web
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