Network & Systems Infrastructure Competition

[dipenshah]

Hi All,

On this weekend 16th & 17th a competition is being held in our college.

Here's the situation.

Hello,Welcome to Minion Insurance!Our company is opening on April 16, 2016 and we're excited to have you coming on as our first IT Team! We aren't really sure what we're doing with this whole "IT" thing, so all we have is an empty rack and a credit card for you to use.I've asked my assistant, Jeremy, to prepare some orientation information for you, which you can find below.We look forward to you starting soon! Sincerely,Alfred Pennyworth CTO, Minion Insurance Making IT Great Again

The potential topics the competition might cover are:
Potential T opicsThis is a list of topics that c an be in the competition but might not be. There may also be topics not listed here in the competition.● Wireless● TIA568 Standard● BGP● EIGRP● OSPF● Port Security● IP Source Guard● Dynamic ARP Inspection ● MPLS● VoIP● T1● Web servers● Monitoring servers● File servers● DHCP● DNS● Active Directory● LDAP● RANCID● GPOs● RADIUS/TACACS● Firewalls● ACLs● VLANs/Trunking● Tunneling● RSTP● Documentation● Load balancing● Cisco/Juniper● Virtualization● Racking equipment

We will be given empty racks and scenarios that require us to figure out what systems, services, equipments, etc. will need.

We will be provided with laptops we can't take ours.

My question is if someone wants to plan, design and implement a network what are some basic things he/she should keep in mind

Somethings which people miss out easily while building a network and then realize it's too late to implement.

Dipen


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[Dieselboy]

There isn't enough information to proceed. No money would be spent, and no network would be set up

Do I win? I just saved the company millions.



Seriously though, very basic questions need to be asked as a base, and then I would expect more involved questions would be encroached upon from there.

To help you, here is what we know about the company:
- Their business name
- they may be in insurance, but they state "making IT great again"
- they have empty rack-space which may be within their premises

So that's next to nothing to go on.

[icecream-guy]

Can't do nothing without a network diagram so start there, use it as a blueprint to build the network. while putting the pieces together you will have a reference.

use some of the CCIE Lab tips Cisco posts here
http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/ccie/rs/lab_exam_tips.html
that may help some too.

[deanwebb]

"Empty rack and a credit card"... nice problem to have.

To me, credit card implies a budget under $100K for the whole enterprise. Look at what's best for small-medium businesses (SMB) and using that gear. What vendors can you choose from? Maybe you want HP Procurves instead of Ciscos as far as price may go... If it's all a single vendor, it'll still be nice to know that vendor's SMB offerings so that you can shop appropriately for the ports and speeds you need for this to work.

Server services are also mentioned in that blurb. What will you use for a virtual environment? ESXi or Hyper-V? I'd recommend that the servers be on a different VLAN from the rest of the LAN.

You will likely want to be sure to get managed switches and NOT dumb switches or semi-managed switches. Fully managed switches. If you have at least one switch that can do routing functions, that would be awesome.

A Cisco ASA 5506 is the quick and dirty firewall for this hypothetical small business. If you want something that is easy to set up and get basic functionality in place, the 5506 (or even the 5505) is the one you want. It's a competition, so speed matters. From Palo Alto, PA200 is good. And don't forget the Juniper SRX: very powerful combination of features on that box, so it can be a good bang for buck situation.

[Dieselboy]

There isn't really enough to go on, to start deciding which equipment to buy. We don't know if the company is one person or 1000 people. We don't know if it's one office floor, or multiple floors. There isn't even a mention whether the desks have infrastructure cabling from a patch panel in the rack to the floors. A lot of assumptions would need to be made first, and this should be detailed with explanations as to why those assumptions were made. From there, then you have a base for what equipment to buy and giving reasons would be simpler because the ground work was laid already.

This all sounds like a lot of paper work

[dipenshah]

Thank you everyone...those are great points to keep in mind [emoji4]

I will update soon about things I will learn today. This competition is going to give me a great learning curve and I'm very excited for it

[dipenshah]

Some pics from competition which the organizers uploaded




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[deanwebb]

Lots of Cisco cyan on that network gear, there. And it looks like you get to do all the racking and cabling, too!

[Dieselboy]

That looks really good!

[NetworkGroover]

I'm confused - what is this?

[dipenshah]

What a day it was!!

@aspiringnetworker we have competition in our college wherein we are building a network from scratch.

We had 5 scenarios to complete today out which we completed almost 3 lol and hope to complete remaining 2 tomorrow. In addition to it we have 5 more scenarios coming up tomorrow.

Adding scenarios for documentation purpose so that anyone who wants to create or learn how to create a network from scratch might refer this!



Best,
Dipen


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[deanwebb]

Those look totally fun.

[dipenshah]

Yes too much of awesomeness


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[SimonV]

Cool idea, would love to participate!

[NetworkGroover]

Ah ok - cool!