Need some tips in reorganizing our LAN.

[Mark Jayson Alvarez]

Hi,
 
 Right now, I'm working in a poor government agency where the network is not well organized. Its hard to trace users that are doing this stuff and doing that.IP addresses are scattered all around the 3 story building.Switches are cascading everywhere.. Everything is a disaster. When a machine is infected with some worms, its trivial to track it down..When one is doing p2p, no one can stop him. Perhaps the reason why this is happening right now is that the former network administrators did not consider the scenarios that will happen in the future, like increasing number of users and workstations.... mobilization of employees from one area to another, etc.
 
 
 Right now, we have a freebsd 4.7 lying in a dark room not far away from where I am right now. And it is indeed the center of our Local Area Network.. Guess what, it has only 2 interfaces. One connected to public, and the other connected to our private switch. That private interfaced is aliased to multiple subnets like this:
 
 10.10.1.1
 10.10.2.1
 10.10.3.1
 10.10.4.1
 10.10.5.1
 
 This interface is connected to 1 switch and then 5 or more switches are connected to this main switch. Those 5 or more switches are then scattered to every area of the building. I know you are thinking a lot of negative things about this setup, but this is what it really looks right now.
 
 The MIS suggested a LAN transition project, and I was assigned to lead the team. Right now, we are only two in this very big team. :-) I'm just wondering if I will ever gonna finish this project or not. I have a lot of stuffs mixed up in my mind right now but I really don't know where to start.
 
 I have these in my mind right now:
 
 Connectivity
 1. wired
 2. wireless
 
 Machines being hooked into the network:
 1. servers
 2. workstations
 3. testbeds
 4. personal (laptops etc.)
 
 Will use DHCP
 Will use centralized directory service
 Will use centralized authentication
 We have at most 150 employees...
 We don't have that much to spend on equipments like managed switches, powerful servers, etc.
 We have a lot of political issues that needs to be resolved regarding network usage policies
 
 
 All these stuffs, basically mixed up in my mind. I really have no idea where to start aside from creating a purchase request for a new PC router and a multiple port lan card, which I already did a week ago..And it has not arrived yet. :-) Please help me. I told my partner that services configuration is just a piece of cake once we already have a definite plan. I really don't know where to start. I'm not even tasked to do this... I'm just tasked to help my partner who is a member of the poor MIS. At first, I thought this would be just as easy as upgrading the machine to FreeBSD 6.0 and then reconfiguring the firewall ruleset, but I was wrong.
 
 If you have any Network Transition plan that you may want to share to me, please do so. Even if we don't have that much similarities in our network setup, at least the non technical part like planning etc...
 
 
 Thanks
 
 Sincerely
 -jay
 
 
 
 
 
 
		
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