Data Communications for PineMartin Fuels Ltd

This study analyzes and discusses the network requirements of PineMartin Fuels Ltd and designs the network. It covers the benefits of networking, network design, IP addressing, network services, and security.

Running head: DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
Data Communications for PineMartin Fuels Ltd
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
Summary
The aim of this study is to analyse and discuss the various network requirements of the
company PineMartin Fuels Ltd along with designing the network. The report discusses on
about the various components, services the security threats they may face along with
providing necessary solutions and measures to mitigate the risks. Through the network design
the report gives a very abstract picture regarding the layout of the network components of the
company and thereafter mentions the cabling requirements while also listing the approximate
estimates on cost of acquiring the cabling. Then, after discussing on IP configuration and
security, the report ends with concluding notes and its is observed that the company only
needs to spend a little over 50 GBP for all the cabling involved in the network. Thereafter the
study goes at depths on the networking services and ends with mentioning the various
security risks along with mitigations. Lastly concluding notes are provided.

2DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Discussion..................................................................................................................................3
Task 1- Benefits of networking..............................................................................................3
Task 2: Network Design.........................................................................................................5
Task 3: IPv4 Addressing........................................................................................................7
Task 4- Network Services......................................................................................................8
Task 5- Network Monitoring...............................................................................................10
Task 6- Security...................................................................................................................12
Conclusion................................................................................................................................15
References................................................................................................................................16

3DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
Introduction
This report deals with discussing the benefits of networking, creating a network
design, conducting a cost estimation while also detailing the IP addressing for both the floors
of the company’s office and proceeds to talk about the networking services as also the
security risks and appropriate solutions. The report begins by digging into the benefits, after
which the network design is provided followed by cost estimation of cabling and IP address
allocation. Then the study talks about the networking services in great detail after which the
security risks related to networking and their solutions are methodically explained. At the end
concluding notes are provided listing down the observations of the overall study.
Discussion
Task 1- Benefits of networking
PineMartin Fuels Ltd is a well-known supply oil organization which is provided to
private homes and is required for commercial installation. The organization aims to provide
maintenance service to the customers. The organization can easily employ around 15 clerical
staff members to service engineers and proper delivery to drivers (Hamid et al., 2015). At
present all the data of the customers are stored in personal customers that have supplier
information and data of accounts. Staff who makes use of system have received proper
training and are very much accustomed to the present system. The director of this
organization is encountering issues with respect to data consistency (Cheung, Lee and Chan
2015). The organization has decided to provide solution to the problem would be setting up
networking of the personal computers and holding data in central way. Networking of this
office will help in addressing a large number of problems like
Improving the overall efficiency of storage and volume: By the help of networking
of the computers of PineMartin will mainly nature the store data in personal computers. An

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individual will get combined storage volume of various system that is there in the network. It
is mainly done because business will get huge amount of data from different employees. This
organization comes up with generic branding of graphics files (Cantono et al., 2016). Each of
20 employees will make use of files that are present at various times. Without the help of
network, an individual can store the files which are there in twenty systems. By the help of
network, employee just to store one of twenty systems in the office or even on a central
server. It will ultimately reduce storage by around 2000 %. There will be some data will be
unique to employees and some will be accessed centrally by others. An IT provider will be
used for figuring out the overall setting of the network (Lin et al., 2015). It will help in
providing centralized solution or even basis peer to peer-based network.
Flexibility of access: The best part of modern networking technology is that it can
provide flexibility to the employees of PineMartin. Executives or Managers just need to take
their tablet to a meeting and start the document presentation in front of the client (King and
Farrel 2015). Manager just needs to move to their office system and they can start working on
the rest part of the document. At the lunchtime, user can discuss with respect to document
among the colleagues by the help of smartphone.
Making use of Centralized Database: If the user comes up with centralized set-up of
network then it can offer additional benefits. Apart from the centralized file-storage, this
organization can make use of this for both data entry and its retrieval (Buchan and Jones
2018). In other words, PineMartin ltd can create a centralized database which can be accessed
by various employees in range of devices. The organization can gather data about the
customers from the centralized database (Sehta and Mishra 2018). The organization can make
changes with respect to information about the customers like changing the customer or even
purchasing of product.

5DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
Task 2: Network Design
Figure 1: Network design
The above network diagram designed with the help of Cisco Packet Tracer describes
in detail the design of the network of PineMartin Fuels Ltd for the second floor. Here Router0
represents the Internet Service provider (ISP) which is connected to the DNS server (Perera et
al. 2014). The firewall 5505 ASA0 gets the internet connection from the ISP, secures it and
relays it to the main switch Switch0 which distributes the connection to the different floors of
PineMartin office building through their respective switches (Xu and Su 2013). In this case
Switch1 obtains the internet access from Switch0 and distributes it to the devices of the
respective floors. The devices that are requiring this internet access are the workstations, the
servers, the wireless access points and the shared devices. All of these devices are connected
to the Switch1 by the gigabit Ethernet cable and Switch1 is in turn connected to Switch0 and

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Switch0 to the firewall with the help of fast Ethernet cables (Hank et al. 2013). On top of that
laptops connect to the network remotely utilizing the wireless access point. The firewall is
again connected to the ISP with a gigabit Ethernet cable. Other than that a generic computer
is used for configuring the different rules, policies and proxies of the firewall. This generic
computer is connected to the firewall with the help of a RS 232 cable (Szabó and Gontean
2013). A Cat 6 Ethernet cable can provide higher bandwidth while costing the same as Cat5e
cables. The cost of 100 feet of such cable is roughly 6 Great Britain Pounds (GBP) including
tax (Stiglitz 2015). The gigabit Ethernet cables provide a maximum transmission speed of 1
gigabytes per second while fast Ethernet cables provide a maximum speed of 100 megabytes
per second. Hence the individual devices are connected with gigabit Ethernet cables to
eliminate the concerns of bottlenecking which may arise from the numerous branching that
occur in switches. But connections to switches are more direct so the latency is not affected
much which is why fast Ethernet cables are used for connecting switches with one another as
well as the firewall. In case of the ISP, connections are delivered to the office of PineMartin
Fuels Ltd through gigabit Ethernet ensuring maximum reliability though the ISP itself is
connected to DNS servers with fast Ethernet cables (Kamilaris, Papakonstantinou and
Pitsillides 2014). This is an efficient way of conducting business by reducing costs of
investment. Since connection to ISP is direct, latency hit is minimal, also if the bandwidth
being provided by the ISP is less than 100 megabytes per second, it is meaningless to use
gigabit Ethernet cables here.
The different devices used in the network are Cisco ASA Security 5505, a generic PC
for network administration, 2960-24TT switches, generic PCs to represent the workstations,
generic server to represent the servers, generic wireless access point to represent all wireless
routers and repeaters, a generic printer to represent all the shared printers as well as other

7DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
shared devices within the network and generic laptops which use the wireless access points to
connect to the network.
It is estimated that the second floor being serviced by Switch1 houses 7 generic
workstations and one for configuring the network, 1 server, 1 wireless router, 1 printer and 3
laptops. These workstations are positioned at a distance of about 5 feet from each other which
means a total length of (7 * 5 = 35) feet of gigabit Ethernet cable needs to be purchased by
the company along with additional 15 feet for the servers, printers and wireless router which
amounts to 50 feet. Based on the cost mentioned earlier this will cost the company about 6*5
= 30 GBP for second floor. The 3 workstations of floor 1 being in three different rooms are at
lengths 10ft apart and hence requires 10*3 = 30 feet of gigabit ethernet cabling. Therefore,
the cost becomes 6*3 = 18 GBP for first floor. Additional 10 feet of cabling is required for
the server and switch that are distributing the connections to switches of both the floors with
fast ethernet cabling costing 9.59 GBP including tax (Parol and Pawlowski 2013). Therefore,
combined cabling cost becomes (30 + 18 + 9.59) = 57.59 GBP.
Task 3: IPv4 Addressing
The major network chosen for IP address allocation within the company is
172.168.0.0/27. Hence total available IP addresses in the major network is 30 which is
considered handful as number of required IP addresses is 20. With this network the company
can allocate connections to two floors with network configuration of second floor being
detailed above. To accomplish this the network needed to be broken into two subnets where
assignable IP range for second floor is 14. For this purpose, the CIDR (Classless Inter-
Domain Routing) should be increased from 27 to 28 (Asher 2015). For receiving the internet
from the Internet Service Provider (ISP), securing it and relaying to both the floors, only 6
connections are considered enough and hence the CIDR value needs to be further increased to
29 allowing a maximum of 6 connections. The detailed specifications for Floor 1 are:

8DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
Assumed size – 6
Allocated size – 6
Network address - 172.168.1.0
CIDR – 29
Subnet mask – 255.255.255.248
Assignable range – 172.168.1.1 - 172.168.1.6
Broadcast address – 172.168.1.7
Floor 2:
Assumed size – 14
Allocated size – 14
Network address - 172.168.1.8
CIDR – 28
Subnet mask – 255.255.255.240
Assignable range – 172.168.1.9 - 172.168.1.22
Broadcast address – 172.168.0.23
Task 4- Network Services
In system networking, network services are nothing but various kind of application
that runs on application layer. It tends to provide huge number of benefits like data storage,
presentation, communication and another kind of capabilities (Addad et al., 2018). It is
mainly implemented by making use of client-server and peer-to-peer to architecture which is
based on application layer protocol. Each of the provided services tends to run server

9DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
computer which runs on one or more systems. It is easily accessible through network by the
help of client components which run on other associated services. Domain Name System
(DNS) aims to translate the given domain names into proper IP address and DHCP (Al-
Zubaidy, Liebeherr and Burchard 2016). It generally requires proper configuration of
information to the given network host. The main function of authentication server is all about
identifying and making use of authenticated users so that they can log in the server by making
use of proper statistics. There are some common kind of DNS based file system which is
available on LAN like E-mail and printing.
Email: By the help of email technology, user can send message in various regions of
the globe within a span the span of time. By the help of email technology, PineMartin Ltd can
carry out their business irrespective of their geographical location (Saito et al., 2017). The
organization can make use of email for carrying out some of the basic tasks like ordering,
making contract and billing of items. Communication through the mode of email can easily
improve the method of communication by providing fast response to their customers.
Domain Name Server: DNS is known to be part of system server that contains all the
required database for Public IP addresses and related names (Huang et al., 2015). It is the
alone system in the whole world which helps in browsing the internet. With every passing
year, internet is becoming an integral part of society. So, as a result it is considered as a vital
part of DNS server (Baldin et al., 2016). Without these, internet may not exist. User does not
need to memorize the IP address as it comes up with nifty solution for changing domain or
sub-domain name into IP address.
File Server: File server is a good server which provides easy access to files. It can act
like storage of file at given storage location which can be accessed by large number of
devices. In general, file server is found in the enterprise setting like organization networks but

10DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
they are used in small organization and schools and lastly home-based networks (Garg and
Wang 2015). A file server is also used as a dedicated network like network attached storage
devices. It can be simple like system which shares the host files. Dedicated file server is
mainly used in various enterprise-based application. It is mainly done so that they can
provide much faster data access and provide more storage-based services.
World Wide Web: It is a network for various online content that is formatted in
HTML and provides access through HTTP. The given term is completely linked HTML
pages which can be accessed over internet (Rosen et al., 2017). It can be defined as the
collection of web pages, videos and online content which can be accessed through web
browser. Internet is nothing but internet connection which allows an individual to send email
and gain access to world wide web.
Task 5- Network Monitoring
SolarWinds is a Network Performance Monitoring Tool which is very much powerful
and affordable in nature. This particular software will help an individual to easily detect,
resolve the issues with respect to network performance and its outage (Anipko 2015). Solar
Winds is very much helpful in providing the best performance for monitoring of application
and server deployment on Microsoft Azure. It can be done on both IaaS and PaaS along with
health of office 365 and it can be integrated into a single glass panel. This network
performance monitoring tool comes up with access right manager which can monitor and
audit any kind of authorized access. All the required changes can be made into Active
directory, SAP and SharePoint (DeKok 2015). It ultimately provides modification, creation,
and deactivation of required user access to the given service and files. Latest Solarwind
network management portfolio comes up with network management portfolio that can
provide support to Cisco ACI monitoring.

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This network performance monitoring tool is manufactured by SolarWinds Inc. The
headquarters of the organization is located in Austin, Texas. The organization comes up with
range of product development offices that are located in various region of United States and
other countries (Zhou et al., 2016). The latest version of network performance tool is 12.1
that helps in cross-stack of data correlation. The tool is available for free at file hippo.com.
The author of this networking software is SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC.
SolarWinds aims to provide powerful and affordable IT management-based software
to large number of customers at world-wide platform. The main focus on this organization is
to provide end to end hybrid IT performance management which has established it as leader
in the world. It is known to be best firm to manage network software and MSP based solution
for driving growth across full spectrum of IT-based software (Wang and Wu 2016). It tends
to provide a range of features that can be used by organization like
Fast, performance and Availability Monitoring: The tool can quickly detect,
diagnose and solve all the issues with respect to network performance (Hamid et al., 2015). It
is mainly done so that they can tackle downtime with the help of this software.
Drag and discover network performance chart: By the help of network performance
metrics along with interactive charts and graphs on the given network-based devices.
Cross-Stack network data correlation: Proper acceleration of the root cause is done
by the help of drag and drop network performance (Cheung, Lee and Chan 2015). It comes
up with same line of performance metrics on the given line. The immediate visual correlation
is seen in large number of network data.
Dynamic wired and wireless network discovery and mapping: The tool can
automatically look for new map devices, performance-based metrics, link usage, and proper
coverage.

12DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
Hardware Health Monitoring: There is need for proper monitoring, reporting, and
alert on the device metrics which is inclusive of various parameter like fan speed and supply
of power.
Automated capacity forecasting, alerting and reporting: There is a need for
automatic calculation of exhaustion dates by making use of given threshold based on peak
and average usage.
Fig 1: SolarWinds Network Performance Monitoring
(Source: Cantono et al., 2016)
Task 6- Security
Network security mainly deals with various aspects like prevention from any kind of
unauthorized access, termination of misuse and denial of problem. Security comes up with
huge number of factors like confidentiality, integrity and lastly availability (CIA). Security

13DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
can be considered to be an important factor for protection of vital data of school (Lin et al.,
2015). With every passing day, computer and mobile devices are encountering huge number
of security challenges.
There are mainly three network issue which can be encountered due to a New
Network like
DoS Error: DoS is the abbreviation of Distributed Denial of Service against any kind
of threat. It is considered to be very much difficult to get a rigid form. Apart from this, it can
be easily launched and difficult to track. The generation mechanism of this kind of attack is
very much simple in nature (King and Farrel 2015). The attacker needs to send more and
more request to the system more than what it can handle. By the development of such toolkit,
it has become very easy to disturb the availability of any website. The DoS attacker program
will create a connection with port of service. It is all about counterfeiting the headers and
leaving the connection. If the host can handle around 20 requests per second basis, then
attacker can provide 50 requests per second. It will then result in host server down for making
fake requests (Buchan and Jones 2018). In this scenario, server will not be able to accept
legitimate requests. It is mainly due to the fact that it can provide vulnerability to the server
of legitimate user.
Security Solution
School needs to take a list of steps like
 Coming up with proper strategy of strong authentication
 Maintaining the privacy of username and password from different sources.
 Not giving any kind of unnecessary access to user or even employee or student.
IP Spoofing: It is a method of presuming the IP (Internet Protocol) of a given
network. It is all about creating a proper IP by making use of Internet protocol packets. It can

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disguise intention by harming the real owner of the IP address (Sehta and Mishra 2018). By
proper forging in the header for inserting the information in the e-mail headers. It is all about
misleading the receiver from the original destination. It is also a kind of type spoofing which
is defined as spamming.
Solution for tackling the issues
 Packet Filtering that enters into the network is considered to be as one of the methods
for preventing the spoofing (Addad et al., 2018). There is a need for filtering of both
outgoing and incoming traffic that requires to be implemented.
 ACLs is the best method of preventing spoofing by stopping any kind of false IP
address to enter into the network of school.
 School should focus on the use of SSL certificates so that they can reduce the
spoofing to large extent.
 There is a need for accreditation to encryption so that it can allow only trusted host to
communicate with each other.
Man-in-the middle attack: MITM is considered to be as one of the dreadful kind of
network threats. In this, intruder can easily establish an independent kind of connection with
both that is sender and receivers (Al-Zubaidy, Liebeherr and Burchard 2016). It mainly takes
in smooth manner whether the sender and receiver do not have idea with respect to overheard
by individual. Apart from this, it can expose the given network with huge number of threats
like
Security Solution
School can implement a list of solution for overcoming the issue like

15DATA COMMUNICATIONS FOR PINEMARTIN FUELS LTD
 User needs to make use of public key infrastructure-based authentication. It will
provide protection to application from eavesdropping and another kind of attack
(Saito et al., 2017). It will also validate the application like trusted one.
 School authorities need to setup password that has high level of secret key so that it
can provide more manual authentication.
There is large number of time testing techniques like latency examination and cryptographic
hash function for confirming the time required for receiving the message in both the ends.
Conclusion
To conclude the report begins by exploring the benefits of networking where its is
noted that networking provides certain flexibility of access while also increasing overall
efficiency of the business. Thereafter the study provides the network design, thorough
analysis of which provides clear insight on the efficient network layout being employed and it
is found that the total cabling cost amounts to 57.59 GBP. Following which a detailed
classification of IP address allocation is provided that covers all the network components
currently being required by the company. Then the report discusses in detail the networking
services and ends with identifying the security risks like Denial of Service (DoS) errors, IP
spoofing or even Man in the middle attack as also providing the necessary solutions which
can be adoption of public key cryptography and regular usage of passwords.

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