Chapter 12. Design Methodologies

 

Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try something.

 
 --Franklin D. Roosevelt

Planning and designing a network can be a daunting task. In the early days of data networking, a network consisted of a handful of nodes. Any addressing schemes were normally manually assigned and maintained. This required human intervention any time a node was moved, removed, or changed in any way. This manual intervention was not that bad, however, due to the fact that there were not that many numbers to keep track of.

In today's LANs, this manual addressing would not work. Networks are changing, technology is changing, and LANs have grown to a size that was not foreseeable 20 years ago. In addition, other concerns exist that were not there 20 years ago, including security, the highs and lows[373] of the LAN, and many others.

LANs can be a simple as a handful of nodes in a remote office to as complex as thousands of nodes in a fully meshed routing environment supporting applications that require as much of the highs and lows as can be squeezed out of the LAN any time the application want to do so. LANs are responsible for supporting multiple protocols running over multiple nodes and multiple media types. Many of these node and media types are from different vendors, all of which can potentially be running some proprietary features that may or may not play nice with the nodes, media, and even protocols that are running ...

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