Central University Essay

Suppose you are the network manager for Central University, a medium-size university with 13,000 students. The university has 10 separate colleges (e.g., business, arts, journalism), 3 of which are relatively large (300 faculty and staff members, 2,000 students, and 3 buildings) and 7 of which are relatively small (200 faculty and staff, 1,000 students, and 1 building). In addition, there are another 2,000 staff members who work in various administration departments (e.g., library, maintenance, finance) spread over another 10 buildings. There are 4 residence halls that house a total of 2,000 students. Suppose the university has the 128.100.xxx.xxx address range on the Internet. How would you assign the IP addresses to the various subnets? How would you control the process by which IP addresses are assigned to individual computers? You will have to make some assumptions to answer both questions, so be sure to state your assumptions. At the bottom of this response I have added a crude IP subnet scheme that will be a good start for Central University. Since the university already has a Class B IP range established, I tried to break it down as even as I could while still leaving room for future growth in every area. My first assumption is that every building has sufficient routers, switches, and network fabric to handle the traffic on this scale. I wanted to keep the faculty and staff on separate subnets for privacy and to keep frivolous student traffic off their subnets. These subnet breakdowns are not perfect by any means. I tried to use a Cisco tool to create a better breakdown, but I can’t figure out how to use it. If I were actually a paid network admin, I would have better software to accomplish this. Anyway, I would use DHCP servers to assign individual IPs to alleviate the issue of having to assign static IPs to people. This would help with the administration of constantly changing numbers of nodes and their specific locations.