Sebastian's Sea Creatures Essay Explores Network Model, Bandwidth, Collisions, And Cloud Computing.

Week One

Assignment Question:

“Sebastian’s Sea Creatures” is a family fun park that exhibits rare and weird animals from the ocean depths.  Employees log onto their computers with usernames and passwords that are managed by a domain controller.  What type of network model is being used at Sebastian’s Sea Creatures?  Describe one (1) advantage and one (1) disadvantage of this model.

Assignment Question:

Sebastian’s Sea Creatures has 25 workstations in their administration office.  You are the IT manager for the company and Sebastian has asked you to replace the 300Mbps wireless access point (AP) that services the office with a 100Mbps switch.  Will this increase or decrease the bandwidth available to each workstation?  Explain your reasoning by including estimates of effective bandwidth for each case.

Assignment Question:

There are two other LANs at Sebastian’s Sea Creatures, one for the café (called CAFE) and one for the admissions gate (called GATE).  There are 5 workstations on each LAN.  On CAFE, the workstations connect to a 100Mbps hub.  On GATE, the workstations connect to a 100Mbs switch with all ports operating in half-duplex mode.  If you connected your laptop to GATE, would it be subject to more, the same or less collisions than if it was connected to CAFE?  You can assume data rates and traffic patterns are the same on each LAN.  Justify your answer by explaining the origin of the collisions.

Assignment Question:

Sebastian’s Sea Creatures fun park consists of several buildings spread over a sprawling facility. The new venomous jellyfish enclosure has been built some 200 meters from the administration building.   You need to connect the Intermediate Distribution Frame in the jellyfish enclosure to the Main Distribution Frame in the administration building.  Explain two reasons why UTP would not be an appropriate backbone medium.

Assignment Question:

Being a knowledgeable and forward-thinking IT manager, you have decided to move your networks over to IPv6.  Describe 2 advantages or benefits of doing this.

Even though you know moving to IPv6 is a good thing, you realise that you can’t do it all immediately so will need to transition to it gradually.  Explain how it is that IPv4 and IPv6 could co-exist on the same networks at Sebastian’s Sea Creatures and describe two technologies that enable this.

Back at Sebastian’s Sea Creatures, you are trying to determine if a switch is working properly.  Its switching table has the following entries:

MAC Address	Port #
00-25-2A-00-00-0F	4
00-25-2A-00-10-FC	1
00-25-2A-00-00-DD	2
00-25-2A-00-11-21	3

Port 3 is connected to a hub.

During your testing, the following events occur:

1. The entry for 00-25-2A-00-10-FC expires.
2. An addition device (00-25-2A-00-10-00) is connected to the hub on port 3.  
3. A new virtualised machine (00-25-2A-AA-10-0C) is started on the server connected to port 2
4. Device (00-25-2A-00-10-00) is disconnected from the hub on port 3 and connected to port 5.  

Draw the switching table that you’d expect to see at the end of these events.  The order of entries is unimportant:

Your answer:

MAC Address

Port #

Assignment Question:

Things are not going very well at Sebastian’s Sea Creatures.  Sebastian downloaded an app from the Internet, but it wasn’t all it appeared to be. When he ran it, the program actually opened the underwater gates between the shark pool and the “swimming with dolphins” tank:  it all became very messy.  What type of malware caused Sebastian the problem?  What are defenses against this type of malware?

Assignment Question:

Business has taken a hit since the unfortunate incident with the sharks getting loose.  To save money, Sebastian has decided to fire all his IT staff – that includes you L He is thinking of outsourcing all the IT operations to the cloud because he doesn’t want to pay people to manage local hardware and software.  What type of cloud computing service is appropriate to this situation?  Justify your answer.

Assignment Question:

Organisations have several options when it comes to centralised storage.  If Sebastian’s Sea Creatures needs to have high speed access to sensitive data, contrast two solutions that address these needs.

Answer:

The model being used in this organisation is the OSI model, this model is used and together with the domain controller .

The network domain consists of all the accounts of the networked computers and also their user’s accounts which are then put in one group to ease the management of the network resources and manage the access and authentication of the clients.

Advantages.

1. The OSI network model has special features with unique infecting capabilities and network protocols which can be used to set up a secure network.

Disadvantages.

1. The OSI model has one limitation where most of the layers has duplicated  services  where in two layers there is a mechanism of controlling error hence make even the data transmission more tedious.

Question:

Give the networks models used in Sebastian’s Sea Creatures?  Give one advantage and disadvantage of this model.

Sample Answer:

The OSI models will be used for the organisational domains controls ,however both the OSI model and domains controllers were used concurrently.

This model is made of users and the computer accounts that enhances the ease in managing the resources in the networks through authenticating users.

The advantage of this model is that it has some features that enhances the network security.

However this model only disadvantage is the duplication of some network layers meant for error mitigation.

Answer:

The bandwidth will decrease. This is because the switch upload speed is very slow compared to the wireless access point, however the switch will offer a stable connection compared to the AP since the AP has chance of decreasing the bandwidth due to attenuation of the internet signals.

The estimated bandwidth for the access point will be 300mbps/25=12mbps while the switch bandwidth will be 100mbps/25=4mbps therefore there will be a decline in the bandwidth.

Question:

Will the change to switch from AP lead to increasing or decreasing of the network bandwidths to the workstations?  Give the explanation and give the estimated effective bandwidths for both cases?

Sample Answer:

There will be a decrease in the bandwidth .This is because the access point devices has higher speed of transmission then the switch devices.The estimates for the bandwidths will be 12MBPS and 4MBPS for the Access point and switch respectively.

Answer:

The will be less collisions. This is because the GATE network with hub will be forwarding the message to each computer connected hence causing collisions unlike the one CAFÉ network where the switch forwards the signals to the specific computer in the network hence eliminates the chances of collision.

Question:

If you connected laptop to GATE, would it be subject to more, the same or less collisions than if it was connected to CAFE?  

Sample Answer:

Week Two

For this case the level of collision will be less.This is because as the switch forwards the signals to the destination device ,the hub send signal to all connected hosts and thus leading to collision therefore the CAFE will be having less collisions

Answer:

The unshielded twisted pair cables is not appropriate to be used in the connection of the two buildings  which are within 200 m away due to the following.

1. It is much susceptible to inferences due to the radio waves hence can lead to data interruptions.
2. It is poor due to cross talking which causes noise to the data signals and hence transmissions will be insecure.

Question:

. Give explanation with two reasons why UTP will not be appropriate to be used as network backbones medium.

Sample Answer:

To connect the two building the UTP cables will not be used this is because ,it is highly prone to interferences from electric fields and it experiences cross-talks and affects the signals transmission.   

Answer:

The conversion of the organisation network from the IPV4 to IPV6 will be associated with various advantages which includes.

1. High efficiency in terms of routing, where the routing table end up being reduced this is by aggregating prefixes of the network.
2. Improves on the processing of data packets, this is by ensuring that the header of the packets are more and more simple and there will be no multiple calculations of the checksums (Simson ,2015) .

Question:

Describe 2 advantages or benefits of moving network to IPV6.

Sample Answer:

As a result of moving to the IPV6 there will be various benefits which includes :

1. Efficiency in terms of network routing.
2. It boosts the data frames processing by minimising calculation of the checksum.  

Answer:

The change of the IPV4 to IPV6 is not a direct exercise however the process is gradual since the IPV4 has to move the resources to the IVP6 network and it is done by help of the following two technologies (Ross ,2016) .

1. Dual stack technology. This is used to enable company in building IPV6 network parallel to the IPV4 that is existing.
2. Tunneling technology. This is where the IPV6 get tunneled to the current IPV4 network gradually.

Question:

Explain how it is that IPv4 and IPv6 could co-exist on the same networks at Sebastian’s Sea Creatures and describe two technologies that enable this.

Sample Answer:

The translation to IPV6 is a process and the IPV6 has to inherit the network resources from the IPV4 network where the two major technologies includes:

6. Dual stacks technologies which set parallel networks in both IPV4 and IPV6.
7. The tunnel technologies, this is used tunnelling to IPV6 is done from the IPV4 network.

Answer:

The below is the resulting switch table from the events above.

MAC Address	Port #
00-25-2A-00-10-00	5
00-25-2A-AA-10-0C	2
00-25-2A-00-10-00	3
00-25-2A-00-00-0F	4
	1

Question:

Draw the switching table that you’d expect to see at the end of these events.  The order of entries is unimportant:

Sample Answer:

After the events analysis the below is the resultant switch table.

MAC Address	Port #
00-25-2A-00-10-00	3
00-25-2A-00-10-00	5
00-25-2A-AA-10-0C	2
00-25-2A-00-00-0F	4

Answer:

The problem is caused by the Trojan horse which is malware that is disguised as a normal genuine program, this malware can appear like a game or software program that when clicked or installed do malicious activities in the computer or even destroy the files as well (Peter , 2015)

The defensive way of handling this malware is by installing and updating the antivirus in the computer and avoids installing any un trusted application inside the computers.

Week Three

Question:

What type of malware caused Sebastian the problem?  What are defences against this type of malware?

Sample Answer:

The Trojan horse: This is a problem that results from a virus called a Trojan horse which is obtained by downloading applications from the internet although they tend to be genuine but they are malicious and affects the computer memory, applications and documents.

However this is controlled only by use of the antivirus applications to control the computer virus.

Answer:

The best cloud computing in this case is called Software as a Service .

This is the best service since the organisation will not be having  professionals and this service will enable the organisation to use the applications and resources remotely and therefore there will be no installations of applications in the computers locally or even to set up a data centre (Charlie , 2014).

Therefore it will enable the organisation meet their goals easily by eliminating cost of buying computer hardware, programs and there will be no cost of maintenance ,installations and supports.

Question:

Which is the best cloud computing services that suites this situation? Give justification to Answers.

Sample Answers:

The Software as a Service. This is where the organization will have to host their programs in the computers in the remote servers and no other expense will be incurred to use the services.

The company will therefore be able to run their business at a low prices and no other devices will be bought for use or cost will be incurred to maintain or install the local computing infrastructures. 

Answer:

To implement the high speed data access storages in the network there are two ways that can be used which includes.

1. Storage area network and the,
2. NetworkAttached Storage 

The SAN is a storage device which is dedicated in the networks ,these devices can be tapes drive or even the array disks and they together build blocks for storing data ,however NAS is one device which can be a server and its storage space is shared through the network (Alfred , 2014) ..

Question:

Which are the solutions used to address centralised storage?

Sample Answer:

The below are the ways to do the implementation of the high speed data access in the data storage devices.

1. Storage area network and the,
2. NetworkAttached Storage 

However SAN uses the dedicated network storage media while the NAS uses a single device like servers which is accessible by the entire network hosts.

Reference

Alfred ,A. (2014) Handbook of Applied Cryptography.2^nd edn.New York:CRC Press.

Charlie ,K.(2014) Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World, 2^nd edn. New York :Prentice Hall.

Peter ,N.(2015) Computer Related Risks.3^rd edn. Boston:Addison-Wesley. 1995.

Ross ,A.(2016) Security Engineering.1^st edn.New York :John Wiley & Sons.

Simson , G. (2015) Web Security, Privacy & Commerce.1^st edn.California:O'Reilly.