Communication Networking: Design Flaws, Improvements and Security Measures

COMMUNICATION NETWORKING
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COMMUNICATION NETWORKING
Executive summary
Soylent is located in a three floor building with other three tenants. The company is
located in the 3rd floor which is on the left side. The 2nd floor is occupied by the human resource
department and the administration department. The 1st Floor is located by the engineering
department and the ground floor by the accounts department. Soylent’s network is connected via
a router with an interface address of 128.31.57.1. The administration department contains six
workstations, the engineering department have twelve workstations, the human resource
department has four workstations and the accounts department have eight workstations.
Question 1: Network design faults
Design flaws in a network is what that produces unwanted results in a certain network.
These design faults as those of Soylent’s network cannot be fixed by few commands at the CLI.
First to start with Soylent has four switches, all these switches are connected in sequence i.e. in a
ring form. The switches are connected as A-B-C-D where the network engineer just connected
them in what is referred to as daisy chain where each switch is on the top to bottom this is shown
by the figure below; it is a traditional way of connecting multiple switches.

Figure 1: Daisy chain
This type of connection owns certain drawbacks; first if one of the switch fails them may
be due lack of redundancy then the others will also be dragged in. Example if the engi9neering
department switch fails then all the other switch will automatically fail. This causes un-necessary
network performance issues. In here trafficjam is created in the chain and then slow up the speed
of the whole network. This means that the current switch connection which is Daisy chaining
switches is not recommended for this type of network.
Another issue is Nexus virtual port issue; this allows the network links that are physically
connected to the various switches to appear as one port channel to the third device. This issue
can result to connectivity issues i.e. the issue result to poor network connection. Other issues
which are visible on the network is that the engineering file server is connected directly to the
router which overloads the organization router in performing unnecessary functions. This goes
the same with the email web-server which has connected directly to the router. Lastly, the
network have utilized a ring type of topology. One of the issues with this type of network
topology is that the data packets must pass all the network nodes. Also the entire organizational
network is over-reliant on the wire which connects the components [1].