TNE10006 (Networks and Switching) Case Study

TNE10006 Networks and Switching

Case Study Handout - SUTS 2020 S1 Edition

As per the Unit Outline - the Case Study makes up 15% of your final mark (10% report and 5% presentation for this Unit).
This is a group assignment, and must be completed by:
• Groups of four students only (Teams of 3 only in special cases).
• Groups is advised to assemble from students within the same allocated Lab Class.

Groups MUST be formed by Week 4. You are required to form your groups using this shared spreadsheet: <link>. This
Assignment Page is also used for your Team’s Case Study Report submission.

NOTE: If your groups are not formed BEFORE the end of week 4, group formation WILL BE LOCKED and you will not be
able to submit a Case Study. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to form your group or if you are having trouble ask your Lab
Tutor to manage you into a group with enough time before the deadline arrives.

I. OUTLINE
This Case Study will require you to:
1) Build a small network using three switches and one router.
2) One switch will run as a distribution layer switch, the other two will run as access layer switches.
3) A router will be connected to the distribution layer switch using 802.1Q trunking to route between subnets.
4) The switches will be connected with two Ethernet links using Ether-channel bonding.
5) The distribution layer switch will be configured as the STP root bridge.

II. CASE STUDY DETAILS Your Lab

Supervisor will provide your group with:
• Company/organisation name
• Allocated network address information
• Subnetting requirements for four LANs to operate within your organisation
• VLAN numbers and VLAN names for each of the four LANs
• Network Management VLAN to use in your network
Once you have registered your group in CANVAS, your Tutor will provide this information to the group leader (Member
Number 1) via email or MS Teams Chat.

III. LOGICAL NETWORK TOPOLOGY

The logical topology for the organisations network is depicted in the figure below. Your organisation consists of four
LANs which will each be connected to a single router to route traffic between subnets.

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IV. NETWORK ADDRESSING

Your Lab Tutor will have provided you with a major network address (and subnet mask) and subnetting requirements for
each of your four LANs. When subnetting your network to accommodate the required hosts for each of your four LANs,
you must:
• Ensure that you have enough subnets to address the entire network
• Allocate a subnet for the management network (switches and routers) large enough to cover network growth of
double the current amount of infrastructure
• Subnet optimally such that the largest number of IP addresses within your allocated network remain for future
expansion. In your final report, you must explain your subnetting process and show your calculations.

V. SWITCH PORT ALLOCATION

You have been provided with five VLAN identifiers for your network, one for each of your four LANs and one for your
management LAN (interface VLAN). You have been provided with appropriate names for the VLANs covering the subnets.
The physical topology of your network must match the network diagram below.

For each port on the four network devices, you must nominate:
• Whether it will operate in access or trunking mode
• Which VLANs are allocated to which ports, and on which switches
• Which ports will be disabled
In your final report, you must explain your decision process for switch port allocation.

Note: There will not be enough ports on your devices to cover your network design. You are to assume that the switches
have more ports and to allocate the available ports in a sensible manner. Discuss in your report why you have allocated
the ports as you have done so.

VI. BASIC DEVICE CONFIGURATION

You are required to configure all switches and routers with the following information:
• Device names
• Message of the Day
• Interface descriptions
• Console and Enable passwords
• ssh Access
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• All router interfaces are to have the lowest usable IP address of their allocated subnet Further, all switches should be
configured such that:
• Unallocated ports are disabled
• Appropriate switch-port security is configured
In your report you will need to justify your switchport security decisions and configurations.

VII. ADVANCED NETWORK CONFIGURATION

You will be required to configure 802.1Q trunking connections between the switches. Each switch will be connected to
another switch via two trunking connections where the second connection is used for redundancy purposes.

You will be required to configure your network Spanning Tree Protocol to PVST+ and to ensure that the distribution layer
switch is the Root Bridge.

VIII. ETHERCHANNEL BUNDLING

Network traffic has grown since you first built your network. The Ethernet trunking channels are no longer capable of
carrying the offered load on their own. A decision has been made to change the redundant trunking connections between
each switch into a bundled EtherChannel to double the maximum throughput.
You must reconfigure your network such that the two links connecting the switches now form an EtherChannel. You must
ensure that the distribution layer switch remains the Root Bridge for the Spanning Tree Protocol.

IX. TESTING
As part of the Case Study, you need to devise and document an appropriate testing regime to ensure that all the
following conditions are met:
1) The nominate level of switchport security is functional
2) Full interconnectivity exists between all hosts in all LANs and the management VLAN
3) The redundant trunking links are functional in the event of failure of the primary links
4) The correct switch is configured as the PVST+ Root Bridge
5) EtherChannel bundling is correctly configured, the channel bandwidth is indeed doubled, and that the root bridge
remains properly configured
6) ssh access to all network devices is functional

IX. ASSESSMENT ITEMS

The Case Study submission will consist of two components:
1) A Report: assessed out of a total of 40 marks and worth 10% of your final mark.
2) A Packet Tracer File: assessed as part of the Report marks.
3) A Video Presentation: assessed out of a total of 20 marks and worth 5% of your final mark.

Teamwork: It is expected that every team member contributes near equivalent share in effort to complete this
assignment. This must be indicated in a Group Contribution Declaration in the report (especially if the share is unequal).
Position this section at the head of the Report.
Example:
Group Contribution Declaration
Member Name Contribution List Duties Signature
(Out of 100%)
<Member 1> 25% - VLSM
- Formatting
- Presentation Part 1

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<Member 2> 25% - Switch Configuration

- Trunking
- STP
- Presentation Part 2
<Member 3> 25%
<Member 4> 25%

A. Report Contents
You are required to produce a report that contains the following information:
Group Contribution Declaration
See the previous section for details on Teamwork.

Presentation Video Link

See the next section on Video Presentation.

Subnetting Discussion
A discussion of your subnetting approach, your calculations for each subnet, why particular subnet masks were
chosen and how you allocated the subnets to individual networks.

Network Drawing
A complete network drawing detailing allocation of addressing information for all relevant hosts and devices. This
documentation must include port and VLAN allocation for all devices.

Device Configuration Summary

Tables containing the device information that is not included within the network drawing, including:
• Hostname information
• Console, enable and ssh passwords
• Assigned interface descriptions and the MOTD
• Port security summary

Design Discussion
Discussion of your design and decision making processes and reasoning. These discussions must include:
• Swithport allocation reasoning
• Port security reasoning and design
• Spanning Tree implementation details to define the root bridge
• Planning for redundancy and EtherChannel considerations and deployment

Simulated Network
A packet tracer file containing your simulated network build

Testing Procedure
An outline of how you built your network and an overview of your testing to verify the complete functionality of
your network.

B. Video Presentation
You are required to prepare a (no longer than) 5-minute group video. Each group member must speak for a minimum of 1
minute (four person group) or 11/2 minutes (three person group) on the video and clearly identify themselves. The video’s
content must address a scenario/question involved with the case study network (which will be announced by Week 8).
Upload the presentation as an Unlisted YouTube video, and place the link in the Report.

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C. Marking Details
All students in the group will receive a combined mark out of 60 for their submission including Report, PacketTracer file,
and Video presentation. Marks will be allocated as per the following table:

Component Score
Subnetting
Description of subnetting procedure 3
Properly Subnetted 2
Design Discussions
Switchport allocation reasoning 3
Port Security design 1
Spanning Tree design and implementation details 2
Redundancy planning and implementation 2
EtherChannel Bundling design details 2
Testing
Testing plan for overall network functionality 2
Testing plan for redundant links 4
Testing plan for Spanning Tree 2
Testing plan for EtherChannel 2
Best Practice
Subnet, address, VLAN and port allocations 3
Sub-interface naming schemes 2
Technical Documentation
Network Diagram with all allocated information provided and correct 1
Device Configuration tables 1
PacketTracer Simulation Completeness 5
Clarity, completeness and quality 3
Video Presentation Organisation
Overall organisation of the presentation as a whole. This will be assessed 6
based on the structure of the presentation
Video Presentation Skills
How well are group members able to clearly articulate their part of the 8
presentation in terms of talking to the camera and engaging the viewer
Video Presentation Content
How well does the presentation cover the required content 6
Penalties
Video – for each portion of one minute over the five minute maximum -4
Video – Any student contribution under the minimum length -4
Late submission – per working day late -6
Total 60

D. Submission Requirements
The Case Study is due at 11:59pm on Friday during Week 11 of your provisional schedule shown in the unit outline. The
requirements you must adhere to are:
• All submissions must be completed via the CANVAS submission system at http://www.swinburne.edu.my/canvas
• Only the leader in the group need submit.
• The Case Study report MUST be submitted as a PDF document

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• The video must be submitted as a Link in the Report to a YouTube Unlisted Video. Make sure to host the video on
your YouTube channel for at least 2 years.
• The Packet Tracer File must contain your team’s simulation of the proposed Network. Use the latest version of Packet
Tracer (currently version 8). Submit this file in the appropriate Case Study PT Submission Link on Canvas.
• The online submission system timestamps your submission, a late submission will result in the penalty of loss of 10%
of the possible assignment mark per day for a maximum of five days. Later submissions will result in a score of 0.

X. PLAGIARISM
Please be aware of Swinburne’s plagiarism policies and procedures:
http://www.it.swin.edu.au/students/plagiarism_guide.pdf
Part of this may involve citation of work, a guide is available at: http://www.swin.edu.au/lib/guides/harvard_system.pdf

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Declaration and Statement of Authorship
1. I/we have not impersonated, or allowed myself/ourselves to be impersonated by any person for the
purposes of this assessment.
2. This assessment is my/our original work and no part of it has been copied from any other source
except where due acknowledgement is made.
3. No part of this assessment has been written for me/us by any other person except where such
collaboration has been authorised by the lecturer/teacher concerned.
4. I/we have not previously submitted this work for this or any other course/unit.
5. I/we give permission for my/our assessment response to be reproduced, communicated, compared
and archived for plagiarism detection, benchmarking or educational purposes.

I/we understand that:

• Plagiarism is the presentation of another person's work as though it is your own. It is a form of
cheating and is a very serious academic offence that may lead to exclusion from the university.
• Plagiarised material may be drawn from published and unpublished written documents,
interpretations, computer software, designs, music, sounds, images, photographs, and ideas or
ideological frameworks gained through working with another person or in a group.
• Plagiarised material can be drawn from, and presented in, written, graphic and visual form, including
electronic data and oral presentations. Plagiarism occurs when the origin of the material used is not
appropriately cited.

I/We agree and acknowledge that:

1. I/we have read and understood the Declaration and Statement of Authorship above.
2. I/we accept that use of my/our Swinburne account to electronically submit this assessment
constitutes my/our agreement to the Declaration and Statement of Authorship.
3. If I/we do not agree to the Declaration and Statement of Authorship in this context, the assessment
outcome may not be valid for assessment purposes and may not be included in my/our aggregate
score for this unit.

Penalties for plagiarism range from a formal caution to expulsion from the university, and are detailed in
the Plagiarism and Misconduct webpage.