Friday, April 20, 2018

Multiple subnets on one switch

Hello fellow networkers! It's my first post here, related to an exercise I'm doing for university, and I would love to have some feedback on how I've done it and share with you some thought to have some kind of clarifications, if possible.

In short, the exercise is to build a wi-fi network for a town square, 40 mt. of lenght with approximately 8k people living in that town. The network has to fulfill the needs to let approximately 1k people connect for every events that would be done there. Yes, my teacher really loves practical approach to networks.

The exercise breaks down in some point: * rewriting the problem with technical language, check * a small drawing of the placement of switches, routers, wi-fi APs etc., check * the kind of techology used, i.e. layer 2 or 3 switches, if you need a router or not, why you are using 2.4 or 5 Ghz signal for wifi, (kinda) check * subnetting, dear god help me

Basically, my problems come from the 3rd and 4th point of the exercise, propagating from the third to the fourth. So, I tought to place one layer 3 switch with 4 a Gbps uplink ports all connected to a single layer 2 switch that would manage the 5 access points of the square (one in the center and one for each corner). Now, my main issue comes from the fact that if I use a subnet mask like 255.255.255.0, I can just cover 253 hosts to serve, and this is not what I need but, if I use a different subnet for every access point, I can fulfill the needs of a much more large number of hosts. Now my main problem is, can I create those five different subnets on the same switch? It's something I could do in real life or I need 5 different switches? How would you improve this solution, and above all, why in a particular way?

Final point, security of the network. It's something i can achieve with just some common blocking rules or i need something more specific like a firewall?

Thanks in advance for your help! :)



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