Updating the Company Network

It's not often that you get to come into a greenfield site, and set things up the way you think they should be. Either physically, or in something less tangible, like a network configuration.

Right now, the company I work for has the network design it had, back when I joined. I mean, I've made a few iterative changes to it, with the introduction of proper DHCP management, and moving to a generic naming system for all the machine, but it's still, mostly, a flat layout. The physical layout of switches is a lot better, as I got to put it into a proper tree, rather than a cascade, but that's part of the physical design. Moving to the new site really helped there.

But now, it's time to properly segment it. What worked for us, back when we were 75 people, isn't so good now that we're 250 people. So, it's out with the class B, and in with multiple routed class C's.

Thankfully, we have everything we need in place to let us do this. And it should be pretty much seamless. People will go away one day, and come back to their department in its own little network segment, limited in what they can get at. Being able to use the 'We need to do this for certification' argument makes life far easier. Even if the real reason is to break up the broadcast domains, and add a degree of security. After all, our sales staff don't need to access the PCs of our accounts staff. There will be a little pain, with some of the protection we've done for our web services, however I should be able to mitigate that, with a little forward planning.

Who knows. Maybe I'll be able to get permission to bring our e-mail back in house too. It used to be a good idea to have it outsourced. Now, less so. Problem there is, it'll need money all at once, rather than doled out over the course of the year.

So. Not much of substance in this post. Just a small update on what I'm thinking.