Bsbrel401 Establish Networks: Role Of Assessment Answers

In your role as a Solutions Architect at M2M Solutions, you are leading a team of several system administrators. M2M solutions is a medium sized organisation and is currently expanding its operations.

The company has acquired six sites across Sydney to accommodate its various departments.You have been asked to design a network by utilizing 172.20.0.0 private IP address. The network should span six buildings with a router in each building to join the networks. It is assumed that each building will have its own single subnet .Company expects approximately 1200 workstation across all the sites with approximate numbers in each building as follows:

• Finance Office - 130 workstations

• Transport Office - 135 workstations

• Research Office - 280 workstations

• Sales Office - 50 workstations

• Information technology - 620 workstations

• Head Office - 60 workstations

In Information Technology, a protocol is defined as a different arrangement of rules that focus on the transmission of media. We always utilize a protocol when we communicate either via the internet or just within our company network (Al-Fuqaha & Guizani, 2015). Protocols provide for the collaboration among communicating elements. Since it is evident that there are several ways computers, can be able to communicate, there are many different protocols which include PPP, HTTP, TCP/IP, and FTP.

A network analyzer is sometimes termed as a protocol analyzer or packet analyzer. A network analyzer, therefore, is a harmonization of hardware, programs or even standalone hardware gadgets that are installable in a computer network to improve and enhance the protection of the network against any malicious activity in the network. However, a network analyzer is never mean to be in place of antivirus software, firewalls, and anti-spyware programs however much it reduces the probability of such attacks (Nelson, 2017).

In the past few years, many more people seemed to understand how important network analyzers are for their networks. Now that networks in this age have become smarter and more complex, that understanding has disappeared gradually. The reason for this probably is because of the proliferation of network analyzer tools and the culture where people belief that a network is able to heal by itself. Trust me, they never heal by themselves. Network analyzer programs need to be implemented in any existing network. To give a good example where we need a network analyzer, we shall compare a doctor with a network administrator. Both are very knowledgeable individuals. The doctor is tasked with saving the lives of human beings while the network administrator too saves the network thereby saving humans from trouble. Now, when we visit a doctor when you have certain symptoms of a disease, they don’t look at you at some distance and guess what illness you are suffering from. Rather, they will have to perform several tests so as to get more information and make a correct and informed decision that is based on the results of the tests that were done. This scenario is similar to that of a network administrator or engineer trying to determine what is wrong with their network. Maybe is suddenly cannot ping to other workstations or it is becoming slower. The network engineer ought not to just guess what the issue is or just try things out to solve the problem. They definitely need to find out what the problem is, the root cause of the problem and finally come up with a solution. When a doctor is dedicated to keeping your body efficient and free from disease, he will have to use more than one tool of his trade like Xrays, EKGs and many more. As soon as he finds something irregular, he is going to respond with minimally invasive solutions. Since you are in the same situation with your network, why won’t you just perform network traffic management by utilizing a network traffic analyzer? It would make the monitoring of a network faster, good and more efficient.

While using a toll that constantly monitors your network, any changes will be spotted way earlier before they become major issues. This will help avoid the use of time consuming and expensive resources that will cost the organization valuable money and time.

(b). Analysis of currently available network analyzer tools.

There is a wide array of network analyzer tools available in the market today. Those that are worth the time of any network administrator include Wireshark, Network Analyzer Sniffer Tool (NAST), Zenmap, Angry IP Scanner, and JDSU Network Analyzer Fast Ethernet among many others.

Wireshark is the most powerful and considered the de facto standard in the world of IT (Sanders, 2017). Wireshark has a free version option as well as a version to be paid for. This tool has important features like offline analysis, live capture, and it is multiplatform (can be installed in Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS X, NetBSD and several other operating systems). It is a very easy to use tool since all the captured network data can be seen via a graphical user interface. It furthermore has rich VoIP analysis.

NAST, on the other hand, is a must have network analyzer tool. It performs well in capturing network traffic. With this tool, you are able to a LAN hosts list, look for internet gateways, control arp answers to to be able to find possible arp spoofing, write reports logging, and discover promiscuous nodes.

Zenmap will monitor hosts uptime and manage network upgrade schedules. It has other features like version detection, port scanning, OS detection, full IPv6 support and many more.

All these network analyzer tools can be implemented on a network without spending a single penny. Without considering your level of expertise and your network needs, any of these aforementioned tools will make the task of gathering information about your network very simple and correcting major network issues that arise.

Recommendation.

Finally, after clearly putting out all the advantages and reasons for implementing network analyzer tools in our network, we definitely need to utilize Wireshark. Wireshark is an award winning that can be recommended by any experienced network engineer. Wireshark by far is the best GUI based open source packet analyzer. It has been on the market for over two decades now. Its last stable release version was released on October 10^th 2017 (Ndatinya, Xiao, Manepalli, Meng & Xiao, 2015). For this reasons outlined herein, we need to change our organizational policies and allow for the use of network analyzers in our networks.

References:

Al-Fuqaha, A., Guizani, M. (2015). Internet of things: A survey on enabling technologies, protocols, and applications. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 17(4), 2347-2376.

Ndatinya, V., Xiao, Z., Manepalli, V. R., Meng, K., & Xiao, Y. (2015). Network forensics analysis using Wireshark. International Journal of Security and Networks, 10(2), 91-106.

Nelson, R. (2017). CMT founder makes the case for USB vector network analyzers. Rick’s Blog, EE-Evaluation Engineering. 

Sanders, C. (2017). Practical packet analysis: Using Wireshark to solve real-world network problems. No Starch Press.