TROUBLESHOOTING AND MAINTENANCE

Wally World Troubleshooting and Maintenance Plan



Wally World Troubleshooting and Maintenance Plan

Introduction

Wally World is a large chain of stores, and is looking for improving its network infrastructure from the security perspective. This report presents the basics of Wally World's routing and switching infrastructure, along with the troubleshooting and maintenance plans, to be used by the network support persons.

Routing and Switching Infrastructure

For setting up Virtual LANs (VLAN's) in the company, best strategy is the efficient deployment of switches and routers (Allied Telesis, 2008). The VLAN will provide the employees of the Wally World with the facility of communicating with each other, as they are on a single and isolated LAN, while the security will be improved as LAN's will be segregated in reality. VLAN separates the LAN's without using routers, and distributes the LAN's using multiple switches.

The employees on workstations will be able to communicate without the need of routing protocols, and they will not receive any broadcast message from outside of the VLAN. However, the workstations on a single VLAN will serve as the single broadcast domain. In addition to security, the segregation of network resources in the form of VLAN's will help in improving the efficiency of the networks, as now there will be a greater control on network congestion. Figure 1 (Allied Telesis, 2008) shows the topology of VLAN's using switches. The VLANs of the company will work by tagging packets with an identification header. With the help of these tags, it will become easy to restrict the ports that the tagged packets can be received on intended VLAN's.

Figure 1: VLAN Topology

This VLAN topology using switches will help the branches of Wally World to form workgroups easily. If certain employees have to work on a single project, the network administrators will be able to move them onto a single VLAN just by the alternative configuration of VLAN switches. This will enable the employees to have efficient access to the network resources.

The switches and routers will be configured to reject the packets that come from outside the network and pretend to be coming from inside the VLAN's. This configuration strategy will help in preventing the spoofing attacks. In addition to the secure configuration, the encryption sessions will be enabled on the router, in order to establish secure communication between the local and trusted hosts.

VLAN Routing Solutions

When the two VLAN's connect with the help of catalyst switches, they cannot get the packets from one VLAN to another. For execution of routing between the VLAN's, the switch with intelligent routing capabilities is required. For establishing communication between the VLAN's, the most efficient approach is InterVLAN Routing.

Figure 2 shows how InterVLAN routing can be established using the router supporting trunk links (Firewall.cx, 2011). The router with one trunk Ethernet interface, efficiently routes the packets in between the VLAN's. The downside of this solution is the high cost, as it needs a router sacrificed for routing the packets in between the ...