I am entering into my final quarter of the Associates Degree program at ITT-Tech. In the final quarter all students take a class called Capstone. This class is a 12 week long project that forces you to use all of the knowledge and skills you have learned during your time at the school. Since I’m a Computer Networking Systems student my project is all about building a big, nasty network.
We were handed a 35 page document that is actually a mock-RFP. It details the requirements of a fictitious company’s new network needs and includes building layouts and existing hardware. We are supposed to use this information to create a network solution that meets their needs and present it to the clients (in this case the clients are the school’s instructors and any other students who want to come). In this particular project we are responding to a request from 5 doctors that have formed a new partnership and are trying to update their own internal LANs and also link all 5 locations in to a single WAN. Seems easy, right? NOT EVEN KINDA in reality!
My group decided to go with an MPLS design for connecting the 5 locations. This seems to be the most secure and robust way of handling their data sharing needs while maintaining HIPAA compliance. This type of network is something that was mentioned to us but never really taught. So, we are trying to learn how to build and deploy an MPLS network from scratch in the next few weeks. We realize that the ISP typically configures this type of network for the client, but we still have to know how it works, give IP/subnet schemes for it and demo it in our presentation. We have racks of Cisco routers and switches at the school to configure this on, but we have no idea what the IOS commands are to configure this type of network. So, I’m grabbing my laptop this weekend, heading to Barnes & Noble to look for books on the topic, and then sitting in their cafe (I’m a poor student that can’t afford to buy these books). I’ll fire up Packet Tracer to see if I can stumble my way through it on the simulator before spending hours in the school’s labs in a tangle of ethernet and rollover cables trying to figure it out on the live routers. We also have to configure all of the Servers, MS Exchange, DNS, etc., and produce a working demo of what their network will look/behave like. Twelve weeks seemed like a lot of time but in reality it’s not nearly enough.
I have a fantastic group for this project. Al, Tom and Trisha are probably the the most dedicated and capable students in my graduating class (besides myself, of course). I have no doubt that we will put together a solid solution and a strong presentation. I just hope we don’t have to drop the MPLS idea.
I’m putting out a call for help from all of you wonderful people in internet land. If you have any knowledge or resources that you can share or point me to about configuring this type of network, please post in the comments. Any help will be greatly appreciated! I’ll post updates as I stumble through this project
Wish me luck!
