User Requirements for Royal Palm School LAN

 

 

General Requirements

 

 

 

 

The school district is in the process of implementing a enterprise wide network which  will include Local Area Networks (LANs) at each site and a Wide Area Network (WAN) to provide data connectivity between all school sites. Access to the "Internet" from any site in the school district is also an integral part of this implementation. This specification will focus exclusively on the requirements for the Royal Palm School which is a part of this school district.

 

This network implementation will have to continue to be functional for a minimum of  7-10 years all design considerations should include 1000% growth in the LAN's bandwidth requirements. The minimum requirement for initial implementation design will be 1.0 Mega  Bits per second to any host computer in the network and 100 Mega Bits per second to  any server host in the network. Only two OSI layer 3&4 protocols will be allowed to be implemented in this network, they are TCP/IP and Novel's IPX.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

SECTION 1 - Local Area Network & Wiring Scheme

 

SECTION 2 - Local Server Requirements

 

SECTION 3 - Addressing and Network Management

 

SECTION 4 - Security

 

SECTION 5 - Multiprotocol Routing

 

SECTION 6 – IGRP Design Goals

 

 

SECTION 1 - LOCAL AREA NETWORK & WIRING SCHEME

 

Two Local Area Networks (LAN) segments will be implemented at the Royal Palm School. The transport speeds will be Ethernet 10BaseT, 100BaseT and 100baseFx.  Horizontal cabling shall be Category 5 Unshielded Twisted Pair (CAT5 UTP) and will have the capacity to accommodate 100 mbps . Vertical (Backbone) cabling shall be CAT5 UTP or fiberoptic multimode cable. The cabling infrastructure shall comply with EIA/TIA 568 standards.

 

One LAN will be designated for student / curriculum usage and the other will be designated for administration usage (see: SECURITY SECTION). The LAN infrastructure will be based on Ethernet LAN switching which will allow for a migration to faster speeds (more bandwidth) to the individual computers and between MDF's and IDF's without revamping the physical wiring scheme to accommodate future applications.

 

A Main Distribution Facility (MDF) room will be established as the central point to which all LAN cabling will be terminated and will also be the point of presence for the Wide Area Network connection. All major electronic components for the network, such as the routers and LAN switches will be housed in this location. Intermediate Distribution

Facility (IDF) rooms will also be established, where horizontal cabling lengths exceed EIA/TIA recommended distances. This site already has a conduit infrastructure running between the buildings which dictates the need for 4 IDF’s.  The IDF’s will service their geographical area and be connected directly to the MDF in a STAR or EXTENDED STAR topology.

 

Each room requiring connection to the network will be able to support 24 workstations and be supplied with four (4) CAT 5 UTP runs for data, with one run terminated at the teachers workstation. These cable runs will be terminated in the closest MDF or IDF. All CAT 5  UTP cable run will be tested end-to-end for 100 Mbps bandwidth capacity.  A single location in each room will be designated as the wiring point of presence (POP) for that room. It will consist of a lockable cabinet containing all cable terminations and electronic components; i.e. data hubs. From this location data services will be distributed within the room via decorative wire molding. Network 1 will be allocated for general curriculum usage and Network 2 will allocated for administrative usage.

 

SECTION 2 – LOCAL SERVER REQUIREMENTS

 

DOMAIN NAMES SERVICE and EMAIL SERVICES

The Royal Palm school will also contain a host for DNS and E-mail services (local post office) that will maintain a complete directory of all staff personnel and student population for that location. The school host will be the local post office box and will store all E-mail messages. The update DNS process will flow from the individual school server to the Hub server and to the district server.

 

ADMINISTRATIVE SERVER

The Royal Palm school will contain an Administration server which will house the student tracking, attendance, grading and other administration functions. This server will be running TCP/IP as its OSI layer 3&4 protocols and will only be made available to teachers and staff.

 

LIBRARY SERVER

The school district is implementing an automated library information and retrieval system which will house an online library for curricular research purposes. This server will be running TCP/IP as its OSI layer 3&4 protocols and will made available to anyone at the school site.

 

APPLICATION SERVER

All computer applications will be housed in a central server at the Royal Palm school. As applications such as Word processing, Excel, PowerPoint , etc are requested by users, these applications will be retrieved from the application server. This server will use TCP/IP as its OSI layer 3&4 protocols and will be made available to anyone at the school site.

 

OTHER SERVERS

No other servers are currently planned at the Royal Palm school, but should they become a requirement, they will be considered departmental (workgroup) servers and will be placed according to user group access needs. Prior to implementation of other servers a requirements analysis must be submitted for the purpose of determining placement of the server on the district network.

 

SECTION 3 - ADDRESSING AND NETWORK MANAGEMENT

All computers located on the administrative networks will have static address, curriculum computers will obtain addresses by utilizing Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).

 

SECTION 4 - SECURITY

Each LAN segment will have a file server. All applications will be categorized as curriculum or administrative and be placed on the appropriate server. Each unique LAN segment should be connected to a separate Ethernet port on the router to service the LAN. By utilizing Access Control Lists (ACL'S) on the routers, all traffic from the curriculum LANs will be prohibited on the administration LAN. Exceptions to this ACL can be made on an individual basis.

 

Applications such as e-mail and Directory services which reside on servers located in the Administrative LAN, will be allowed to pass freely since they pose no risk. A user ID and Password Policy will be published and strictly enforced on all computers attached to the administration LAN. A Web server will be located on the public backbone and partitioned to allow the Royal Palm school to install a Web home page on the Internet.

 

SECTION 5 - Multiprotocol Routing

Per the Washington School District requirement, the Royal Palm School’s network will handle multiprotocol routing. Both TCP/IP and IPX routing protocols will be employed.

 

SECTION 6 – IGRP Design Goals

1.      The network should use stable routing, and no routing loops should occur.

2.      The network should quickly respond to changes in the network topology.

3.      The network should have low overhead, and IGRP itself should not use more bandwidth then is actually needed for its task.

4.      The network design should take into account error rates and level of traffic on different paths.