ITN100 Subnetting Lab

 

ITN100 Intro To Telecommunications - Subnetting Lab (Week 4)

The following is my solution for this weeks (6/17/2024) lab created by Dr. EL Gbouri.

Subnet Masks / Subnetting / IP Distribution

1.      What is a subnet and why do networks need them?

Put simply, a subnet is a smaller network that’s part of a larger network. It’s a smaller segmentation of a larger network. It’s a logical division of the larger network at it may be done for several reasons. One would be as indicated in the premise statement for this question – for example a school. It might want to keep different departments divided up amongst themselves in a LAN. A business might want to create LAN for sales, admin, etc.

2.      What is a subnet mask?

A subnet mask is a 32-bit number that helps a network router distinguish between a network address and a host address in IPv4. It tells your router which part of the ip address is used for the network by blocking off a determinate number of bits. The remaining unused bits in the subnet mask are used as host addresses. In the second video the professor gave to us to watch there was a great illustration in binary using the subnet mask. It basically showed 2 network addresses from different devices and a subnet mask – all in binary. And it used the subnet mask to block off the network-based bits and did a comparison. If they were the same, the devices were in the same network. If there was a difference, then they were in different networks.

NOW  Here is the lab:

·         Our IP address is 192.168.1.0

·         We had an increase in network hosts from 53 to 190 (customer service reps from 8 to 145, and administrators and team managers from an unknown number to 45)

·         We want to divide our network into 4 subnets

	Network ID	IP Gateway	Broadcast ID	CIDR
Router 1	192.168.1.0	192.168.1.1	192.168.1.63	/26
Router 2	192.168.1.64	192.168.1.65	192.168.1.127	/26
Router 3	192.168.1.128	192.168.1.129	192.168.1.191	/26
Router 4	192.168.1.192	192.168.1.193	192.168.1.255	/26

 

1.      What will your organization gain from this new structure?

A: It will gain 4 networks that are segmented on the 192.168.1.- range. There will be improved performance and the network should be easier to manage because of its smaller size (62 useable hosts in each segment vs. an unsegmented range with 254 possible hosts)

 

2.      Is this new strategy all pros, or are there any cons?

A: It’s not all pros. For 1, since we are using only a small range like we are we have to put customer service reps into more than 1 LAN. We could put them into a /27 and a /25 to conserve IP addresses, but since we don’t seem to be wanting to divide up the Admin and Team managers we would potentially have an empty LAN since our instructions were to create 4 segments. Another con is we have to purchase new equipment. While it is easier to manage a smaller network, we now have to mange 4 of them - so there's a bit of a trade of here.

 

3.      How many new routers would you need to buy?

A: In our scenario we were using one router. We need 4 routers to use our 4 segments of IP range. Therefore we would need to by 3 more routers.

4.      What is the subnet mask: it should be in the form 255.255.255.X

A: Our subnet mask for a /26 network would be 255.255.255.192

 

5.      What are four gateway IPs you will end up with after you divided the network into 4 smaller ones? Please see the table above for this answer

 

 

References

 

 (465) You Suck at Subnetting—YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved June 19, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/

 

 (465) Subnetting Mastery—YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved June 19, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/

 

PowerCert Animated Videos (Director). (2021, September 30). Subnet Mask—Explained. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Ntt6eTn94

 

RichTechGuy (Director). (2024, January 3). IP Subnetting tutorial | How to subnet IPv4 addresses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hIbzlxbebc