Network concepts and applications

¶ … friend Joseph, who works as a network technician for a global-long-distance firm with 300 networked locations along the Eastern seaboard, calls you for help. Usually, five other technicians are on duty to help him handle technical problems. Today, two of his coworkers are out sick, one is on jury duty and another has not shown up yet. That leaves Joseph and one other technician to solve all the problems that have occurred on this particular morning, including the following:

A networked printer that provides services to the Accounting group at the Baltimore headquarters is not accepting any print jobs. The users have asked Joseph to troubleshoot the printer. They need to send invoices out to customers by noon

Three executive users at Joseph's corporate headquarters in Baltimore cannot pick up their e-mail, and they are calling every five minutes to ask when the problem will be fixed.

C. Half of the workstations in the Advertising department seem to be infected with a virus, and Joseph is worried that these users will copy the virus to the network, thus risking widespread data damage.

D. WAN link is down between the Washington and New York locations, causing traffic to be rerouted from Washington to Boston, then to New York. As a result, customers are complaining about slow performance.

E. The Albany, New York, location's network appears to have suffered a catastrophic failure. This failure has caused outages for thousands of customers in the upstate New York region.

Joseph asks for advice about the order in which he and his co-worker should address the problems (or which to address simultaneously). What do you tell him and why would you place them in that order?

Joseph needs to prioritize the key elements of the network infrastructure of the company first. Getting the WAN link between Washington and new York first fixed is the most critical priority. This could be one of the factors influencing other system problems and will eventually lead to even bigger system and customer service problems if not fixed immediately. The WAN link also needs to be looked at from its impact on the Albany, New York LAN connection and performance as well. He needs to get these two issues resolved ASAP by calling in service providers on these networks for immediate support as well. Getting assistance to solve these two major network issues is by far the most important. Second, is the need for getting the e-mail systems fixed and running diagnostics on the Mail Servers to make sure they are all virus-free and can accept and receive e-mail. This needs to be what he concentrates on after getting service providers to assist with the WAN and Albany, New York network problems. The last two problems of the printer that won't print in accounting and the viruses will be fixed after these two major sets of problems at the network levels of the company are fixed first. Joseph needs to have the other technician get started immediately on the e-mail problem and he needs to get on the WAN and Albany, New York problem ASAP, again using as many resources and support staffs from the company's service providers as possible. The other two departments with problems need to be told of the entire scope of challenges facing the company and be told a reasonable time when they will received support.

Using the link below, figure out which UPS you should use:

http://www.apcc.com/tools/ups_selector/index.cfmchooseServers/Telecom Configure by devices. At the next page choose Networking.

For Manufacturer choose CISCO and submit. Choose Catalyst 2960G-48TC Switch,. Add another device, Cisco 2525 Router and Cisco PIX 535 Firewall.

Continue to Preferences. Notice the? To the left of Extra Power. After you have read to description, close the window.

Choose 50% for Extra Power, and 30 minutes of run time and make it rack mountable Click Show Solution. Tell me what the three recommended solutions are and what their costs are.

APC's configurator provides for a Best Price Model which is the APC Smart-UPS 1000VA USB for $589 and is shown above. This is rack-mountable and given the low price, would be sufficient in the near-term for this project without expansion. If the network configuration was to expand, then the APC Smart-UPS XL 2200VA RM 3U 120V would be the best solution despite its price of $1,275. APC's configurator returned the item of the APC Smart UPS-XL 2200VA Tower/Rack Convertible for $1,150 with the same projected utilization rate as the higher-end model. If it is anticipated that the network will grow over time then the "best Performance" Option makes the most sense.

Thinking about PAR, determine both an Anti-virus solution (research the costs and the implementation remembering that it needs to be VERY simple to keep up-to-date) and a backup strategy. How often should his data be backed up? What is your plan for moving backups off site? You should research what typical backup plans look like (child-father-grandfather) for the media you choose (optical, or tape)