Ed 5769 Day 3

Wednesday, July 6

This morning started off with a reiteration of subnet masking principals. We completed the pinging exercise together and I am happy to say that it is starting to make a bit more sense to me.

Here are the basics of subnetting as I understand it.

1. The subnet masks overlay the IP address.

2. Subnet masks allow the network architect to allocate more IP addresses. This is important because then he or she can allow more devices.

3. Certain devices can “talk” to each other on the network, the governing factors of this are the bits in the IP addresses and subnet masks.

4. One must look at the octets to determine if two machines will be able to communicate over the network. For example in the table below in row A, computer 1 will be unable to “talk” to computer 2 because the numbers in the 3rd octet of the IP addresses do not match.

5. It is not enough to simply have matching subnet masks,however. One must consider that when you add the numbers in the octets to the subnet mask octets the total cannot exceed 255. If it does the computers will not be able to communicate.






It was time to continue working on our switch. It is necessary to add layer 3 routing capabilities in order to increase the efficiency of our network. This process involved setting up VLAN 2 and then specifying the gateway addresses, subnet mask and IP address of our 2nd VLAN.

The second part of today’s class was spent doing an inventory of the Dell 7500 Optiplex workstations that we will use to build up our networks. I am a little embarrassed to admit that I had never taken the opportunity to open a computer and look at and identify the guts of the machines we all take for granted. I have heard terms like “motherboard”, “RAM”, “slot”, “video card” etc tossed around for years and I have been able to glean some understanding from their context but it pulling out the pieces and talking about them was a new experience for me.
Dell Hardware specs for our server


• Total amount of RAM - 3g ram
• Hard Drive Capacity – 320gb (2x160)
• Total number of USB ports -8
• Total number of Firewire ports – 2 (added firwire 1 Mic card )
• Type of DVD drive: Sony DVD +/- RW 8xDVD 24xCD
• Type of Video port(s) (DVI, SVGA, HDMI, RCA, S-Video) – DVI-1
• Network Interface Card type –Broadcom Netxtreme 10/100/1000 PCle
• NIC Maximum Speed – 1000mbps
• Video Interface Card type – PCI
• Motherboard manufacturer – Intel
• Computer manufacturer (ie Dell, HP, etc.) - Dell
• Computer Model Number – optiplex 755
• Monitor manufacturer - Dell
• Monitor Model Number –55a
• Ehternet card- Broadcom Net extreme
• Added Video Card: ATA radeon model B276
• Power supplies Dell
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Qued Q6700 2.66 GHz

Once we had put the workstation that will become our Windows server back together we began the process of setting up the server. We followed the instructions we had gathered from various websites and so far the process has gone fairly smoothly. I am looking forward to continuing the server set up tomorrow.

On a final note it was heartening to see that even seasoned network administrators occasionally run into the odd technical difficulty. I am looking forwared to completing the setup of our layer 3 router and continuing this process.