Campus Network Design and Operations (CNDO)
Synopsis
This is a five day technical workshop, made up of lecture and hands-on lab work to teach the skills needed to design, build, operate and manage a tertiary education institution's campus network infrastructure according to current best practices.
Workshop Topics
Participants in this course will learn about:
- Research and Education network infrastructure
- Campus core infrastructure design best practices
- Campus design principles
- Physical infrastructure (cabling and cabling installation)
- Fibre optics
- Switching (spanning tree, VLANs, L2 protection features)
- Routing (static and dynamic (ISIS/OSPF))
- IPv4, IPv6 and deploying dual stack infrastructure
- Choosing campus routers and switches
- Introduction to Wireless
- Best practice techniques in core network operations
- Campus security implementation and best practices
- Acceptable use policies
- Monitoring
- Firewall placement
- Building sufficient instrumentation to monitor and manage the network
- Networking RoundTable
These skills will in turn drive an increase in campus network usability, security and reliability, as well as enhance the usability of the National REN the campus connects to, and improves the connectivity to and engagement with the regional R&E networking community.
Target Audience
The course targets the network & systems engineers from tertiary education institutions (campuses) and National or Regional Research and Education networks (RENs) who wish to improve the performance and reliability of their campus networks.
Prerequisites
It is required that the workshop participants:
- are proficient with a router command line interface;
- have day to day experience within an operational network;
- are familiar with the Unix/Linux command line interface;
- have basic knowledge of TCP/IP networking;
- are willing and prepared to discuss their own network in the Networking RoundTable session.
Note: The lab exercises use Cisco IOS configuration syntax.
Participants are required to bring a laptop that has a modern web browser installed (Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge etc).
Objectives
At the end of the workshop, students will be able to:
- Explain the goals associated with fit-for-purpose network design and demonstrate this understanding through successful completion of lab exercises.
- Explain the different models of a Research and Education Network and be able to share with the class model used or proposed in their economy.
- Explain physical cabling types, their differences and where they might be best deployed.
- Explain and demonstrate how to build networks hierarchically using a star topology. Students will be able to present their current network topology and explain how this compares to the star-topology taught in class.
- Produce a sample addressing plan and present it, plus the underlying design rationale in class.
- Produce an IP Subnetting and VLAN design for their campus network.