Completed September 2009 to January 2010
Network Stats
- Network users: Approx. 800
- Desktop/ laptops: Approx. 1,000
- Infrastructure devices: Approx. 100
- Functions: Financial, administration, education, marketing and development.
Brief
It became of paramount importance to segregate areas of the Local Area Network (LAN) from different users. This would improve upon the infrastructure security and prevent issues causing reliability issues.
Solution
It was decided to implement VLANs on the ‘flat’ network to accomplish this. Research was carried out to asses the suitability of the current equipment and it was discovered that large parts of the 802.11g wireless network and several managed Ethernet switches would require replacement before any solution could be implemented.
Due to the aged nature of the 802.11g network it was impossible to create different SSID and VLAN mappings via a trunk 802.1Q port from the nearest switch. The infrastructure was replaced with 25 new 802.11g Access Points (AP) with the required functionality.
Layer 3 managed switches were purchased to provide routing functionality between the proposed VLANs and a new addressing scheme was defined using Variable Length Subnet Masking (VLSM), an advance subnet method. Not only would the new addressing scheme conserve IPv4 addresses but also allow a differing subnet size dependant upon VLAN requirement.
Implementation
Configurations were tested using test setups and a simulation environment. A deployment plan was also drawn up to ensure a minimisation of downtime and user disruption. It was anticipated that the deployment and associated testing would require 2 working days. A date was decided upon.
Resolution
The network configuration deployment was completed on schedule with numerous small issues reported resulting from port security policies also applied as part of the configuration.
Personal Involvement
- Initial consultation after issues discovered
- Designing of new IPv4 subnets
- Designing new 802.11g wireless AP configurations
- Testing and documentation of new configurations
- Part of implementation team
- Fault finding with final network
Sample Config. from Deployment.