Advanced Operating Systems:
Potential Configuration of and Justification for a Large Scale Business Network Services Infrastructure
Learning Outcomes:
- Justify the integration of network services at the intranet and internet level for a commercial organization.
- Select appropriate features of an operating system for computer network implementation.
- Configure networking functions such as file sharing, remote desktop sharing, web servers, FTP Services, DHCP, DNS.
- Test and assess the performance of different web server technologies.
Introduction
You are required to build a fully fault tolerant DNS infrastructure and also Load Balanced Web Server infrastructure that utilises shared content and a centralised database facility.
Scenario
A company has an infrastructure that requires three Zones
cnt.co.uk
admin.co.uk
staff.co.uk
The three zones are required as the company has different requirements based on the zone that a device belongs to.
The company has a single gateway machine connecting the company to the internet and have 15 static IP addresses supplied by their ISP. These addresses allow the company to map machines directly to the internet from their own network such as their company internet web server (details to follow). The company's gateway IP Address is: 192.168.200.254
- cnt: This zone is used to map all staff's personal web space located on a single server. The domain is also used to host the company's externally facing web service.
- Once a person is allocated a FQDN in that zone it remains with them while they work at the company.
- admin: This zone is used by the technical staff so they can remotely access machines via a fixed asset number that the machines are given and this remains constant with the machine while it is in use by the company.
- staff: This zone is used to manage the movements of staff within the organisation and their locally shared resources.
Zones mode of operation
Cnt Zone (cnt)
The zone is used to map the individual's personal web space that is stored on a single web server which is only used to support staff static shared website areas and the internal intranet; this server is accessed via intranet.cnt.co.uk.
All staff, when they join the company, are allocated a personal account on the personal web server machine. The Server is a small HP Rack Mount server running Ubuntu Server. Staff have access to a FTP facilities to upload files to it. The personal area is only for static websites only and does not support any server side scripting.
NOTE: You do not need to implement the upload access facility just install a sample of a few user accounts is sufficient with some static pages.
You will need to research the command adduser to do this.
The cnt zone also contains the company's intranet (shared on the personal web services) this supports a dynamic website written in php and requires access to a separate Database Server (MySQL) (A sample page will be required to demonstrate the configuration in your report). The MySQL database is to be managed via PHPMyAdmin (this should be detailed in your report).
The MySQL server will require 5 Databases to be setup for different projects and there should be separate username and passwords setup for the MySQL Accounts.
The company also uses this zone to hold the companies externally facing internet service (DMZ from the 15 IP's), the external DNS mapping is fixed with the ISP who runs your internet domain name mappings, you can only control the internal DNS mappings, but this facility allows the outside world to access your server via the domain name https://www.cnt.co.uk .
The internal mapping of the Internet Service is very stable and tends not to move, it is also mapped to a domain name of: https://www.cnt.co.uk
This company website is in fact a web server farm. It consists of a load balanced Apache servers, there are 3 servers providing web services (fault tolerance) and a shared content server attached to them via NFS, the NFS server is backed up to another machine in a fault tolerant manner via block replication (You do not have to implement the replication).
The internet web servers are to be accessed in a round robin DNS configuration and should be mapped individually as well so they can be accessed and maintained via both the admin and the cnt zone.
The content server should be accessible via the domain name:- nfs.cnt.co.uk and the replication server should be accessible via nfs2.admin.co.uk this machine should be setup on the network and accessible but the block replication will be setup by a separate project.
The authentication security of the NFS/HTTP integration should use rDNS.
Admin Zone (admin)
The admin zone is used by the technical staff to manage the infrastructure of the organisation, all equipment that the company places on the network is added to this domain so that it can be uniquely access by the technical staff who manage the equipment.
This domain regularly has additions made to it, but the mappings of devices to their allocated addresses are rarely changed if ever once added.
The domain name used is the asset number allocated by the finance department and the zone name, asset numbers start with an A and are followed by an 8 digit number.
e.g. A12345678.admin.co.uk
When necessary server machines are also assigned an alias to make them easier to remember and also allows the name used to access them as a service (database, mail etc.) remain constant when equipment is updated or replaced by a new asset. i.e. the asset domain name will change but the access name will be the same.
Staff Zone (staff)
The staff zone is used to map staff in the company to machines, all the machines use sharing of some sort for the staff to make available all their documents or other materials so each member of staff is allocated a domain name based on their name (e.g. William Smith will be given ws, so his full domain name will be ws.staff.co.uk) if more than one member of staff has the same initials a number will be used to identify the individual. All staff movements, should there be any, take place on a monthly basis.
Logging
All DNS requests made should be logged so as to allow an analysis of web usage which will allow the development of a firewall policy in the future. You should therefore show both how logging is enabled and disabled.
Replications
All zones should be configured so as to allow secondary servers to take some of the DNS request load. The cnt zone should employ 2 secondary servers.
TASK
Introduction
A report is required titled "Potential Configuration of and Justification for a Large Scale Business Network Services Infrastructure".
IMPORTANT: The electronic version of the report must be submitted to blackboard (TurnItIn) in Microsoft Word format or a mark of zero will be given.
Structure
The report must not exceed 4,000 words excluding:
- Table of contents
- List of tables and figures
- Glossary of acronyms
- References and bibliographies
- Appendices
The cover page of the report should include course title, module title, assignment title, submission date, and student names and student IDs (See Appendix 1).
All the important information should be contained within the main body of the report. Information beyond the 4,000 words will not be assessed; the word count excludes Figures, references, appendices and listings.
Report Content
The report should be broken into sections as below.
1. Introduction
- The introduction should be a statement explaining the breakdown of the report only (carries no marks)
2. Work Package 1
- DNS Core Configuration
- DNS Core Justification
- Apache (Intranet) Configuration
- Apache (Intranet) Justification
- Database (Intranet) Configuration
- Database (Intranet) Justification
3. Work Package 2
- Apache (Internet) Configuration including Load Balancing (no marks for using a proxy solution).
- Apache (Internet) Justification
- Content Storage Configuration (show examples of the shared content in the report)
- Content Storage Justification
- Database (Internet) Configuration
- Database (Internet) Justification
Each Group report must cover all the sections as stated above. Within the group one student must complete work package 1 and the other work package 2, this must be highlighted on the cover sheet.