University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
School of Information and Library Science
INLS 184 - Protocols and Network Management
Team: Alberti, Eberline, Madariage, Yi

Section 4 - Summary and Recommendations

Overall we found the School of Education network in great shape. It is well maintained by both the staff on site as well as main campus ITS oversight. There is excellent connectivity throughout the building. Wireless access was widely available, and wired ports were just as prevalent. The switches were modern, in excellent order, and running smoothly. There were few, if any, errors spotted on any of the switches. The network seemed well planned out and ready for expansion if needed. At the moment, there are plenty of free switch ports to add workstations. The School of Education network will continue to be an excellent example of how a network should be designed and maintained.

As far as recommendations, we noticed just a few minor things we might suggest to improve a network that is already very good. Since the Horizon web server is the most active on the network, it might be beneficial to move this server offsite like some of the other servers. This would further improve the performance of the network and allow for more strenuous activities, such as more use of videoconferencing, to be conducted. Following this idea, there is plenty of bandwidth and resources available. It might be a good idea to implement some instructional programs that show users how to make more use of the system. Second, we noticed some AppleTalk traffic on the network. Although this is not particularly bad, it probably could be eliminated through a few upgrades. Finally, we did notice an occurrence of file sharing software running on a user's computer. During our scans it didn't appear that any files were being transferred, but this should be monitored in the future to make sure it does not become a problem.

The team would like to extend a huge thank you to Doug Edmunds, Clint Kale, and Jim Gogan for their invaluable help in completing this project. Everyone was very helpful in working out our problems. Without them, we would probably still be trying to figure out our packet capture issue.

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