Scenario Summary
Leonard Cooper Charter School is a K-12 school with approximately 1,000 students. The school wants to develop a local area network that meets the needs of the school now and is scalable for the future. There have been numerous complaints about the speed and reliability of the network, especially since a new addition to the building was added a few years back.
Your Role and Assignment
You are the systems administrator contracted by Leonard Cooper to upgrade the local area network to meet the ever-increasing needs of the building's students and faculty members. Your first task is to interview key stakeholders to determine what the key areas of concern are.
Activity
The charter school's CEO has requested your help in updating the network to meet the demands of the building's faculty members and students. Your job is to interview the key stakeholders and to take action to remedy the issues that they have.
• Write a two to three page proposal addressing each of the stakeholder concerns. Use the technologies below for the areas of concern. All of the technologies listed below will not be used, so be careful with your choices. You must use one of the solutions below to address each area of concern. Be specific in your responses, and justify the use of each technology based upon the concern.
• Category 2 UTP 10Base - T Ethernet Cabling Category 5 UTP 100Base - T Ethernet Cabling Category 6 UTP 1000Base - T Ethernet Cabling
Server Farm File Server Print Server
8 port hub 16 port hub 24 port hub
8 port switch 16 port switch 24 port switch
Storage area network RAID Fiber 1000Based-F
Domain controllers Bus topology Topology
Microwave wireless media Infrared wireless media Radio wireless media
K E Y P L A Y E R S
Helen Ross, Network Technician, Female
"I don't know who designed our old network or what they were thinking. You see, my job is to support the faculty in the building and to fix minor network issues. Well, we often have major issues in our building, and I'm hoping that you can make things better. Printing is a really problematic area for us. You see, we have over 50 networked printers in this building. Although we do need the printers, we need some way to consolidate the management of print jobs, as the queues on these printers often are filled. We also need to navigate to each printer individually to clear them. There has to be a better way because this is ridiculous. Collisions have become a problem for us as well since we started to add new computers a few years ago. In the morning when everyone gets in, network performance slows to a crawl because everyone is busy on the network with their morning attendance and checking e-mail. After performing a network analysis, I figured out that there were way too many collisions on the network. There has to be a way to fix this."
John Fischer, HVAC Tech, Male
"You know, 20 years ago when I started in this business, I never had to have discussions with the computer folks. My, how have times changed! Today, about 90% of my equipment located within the facility can be managed via my laptop and Web browser. Whenever I plug my laptop into the telephone looking jack in the wall, my operating system says that I'm now operating at 10 megabits. Then, whenever I browse to my equipment, I cannot retrieve any data. After going back and forth with the HVAC support techs, they determined that my connection needed to be 100 megabits. They said it must be my network because they were able to walk me through confirming my network card supported up to a 1 Gigabit connection. It would sure make my job a lot easier if I could manage this equipment via the Web. It would also be great to have the option of connecting to this equipment via a wireless connection of some sort."
Selena Daniels, Principal, Female
"Thank goodness you are here to fix this mess. A few years ago, we added a new wing to the building. I'm glad we were able to fund the construction, but the network must have been underfunded. Each of the classroom areas does not have a live network connection port, and that has been a big problem for us because we cannot add additional network devices to the classroom. I asked the previous systems contractor about this, and she said that we have the ability to connect up to 7 classrooms, not 23. She said that's way too many. It's not too many when you have faculty members who now have desktops that are, basically, large paper weights. I need my people connected to the network in this wing, and that equipment needs to be used - bottom line. As for the seven classrooms I do have connected, the faculty there often complain that the connection from their area to the mail server at the other end of the building is often very slow."
Alfred Wingfield, IT Director, Male
"This has been a long time coming. I told the contractors that expanded our building a few years ago that we needed two things: just two simple things. One was and updated cable infrastructure that would enable us to integrate our voice over an I.P. system with our current data system. The other was that all of our backbone switches would be connected to each other with a high speed connection. What did I get? I got neither one of these request taken care of. I swear, I don't know how that crew left here with a pay check. Our voice over I.P. phones will not work because the vendor says we should be running at least a 1,000, 100 based network. As far as the backbone is concerned, after our last testing, I can honestly conclude that it is not running up to par. There is an extreme bottleneck, and communication from one end of the building to the other is sporadic at best. They gave us a twisted pair connection between our old wing backbone switch and the new wing backbone switch, which are about 120 meters apart. You have to have a better solution for us than this because this has been one frustrating ordeal!"