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 Project
Outline
You have just set yourself up as an IT consultancy company, and
have been approached by a major content delivery company (Pen&ink).
They are planning a major expansion of their business, and require
you to produce requirements analysis and requirements specification
docu-ments. It is likely that you will want to bid for the contract
when it is awarded, thus  your
requirements analysis and requirements specification should be
as accurate as possible. They have briefly sketched out the physical
layout of the company, as shown in Figure 1.
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Figure 1:
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Abstract overview of the company, showing the positions
of the routers [SWF][PPT]
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An initial meeting with Pen&ink has produced the following
notes:
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Meeting date:
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3 October 2001
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Time:
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9:30am
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Location:
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Production Department, London.
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Present:
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W.Buchanan (Director), M.Designer (Design Layout Department,
New York), You (Consultant).
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Minutes:
Director:
"Our company (Pen&ink) requires a requirements analysis,
and a requirements specification for our proposed network operating
system. This will be presented at our next board meeting (March
2002), after which we will grant the contract to proceed with
the work. We have asked you to bid for the work, along with several
others, and require you to us a technical specification for this
development.
"Our company has been extremely successful over the past
few years, but our IT infrastructure does not meet our current
demands. Our main departments are: Sales, Marketing, Production,
Graphics Design, Design Layout, Marketing and IT.
"The work will be managed by our IT Department who are currently
responsible for supporting the whole of our network, and thus,
in the future, will require complete access to every single element
of the new system".
"We currently use PCs for all our work, and are main applications
are Microsoft Office, Macromedia software, and many of the Adobe
applications".
"I would like you to produce an outline of the specifications
that we would require for our basic infrastructure; our network
addressing strategies; the security programming for the routers;
the distributed file system structure that we should use; and
anything else that you think could benefit us".
Outline
specification
The IP address that has been granted is 143.20.x.y, with the following
specifications:
Router topology.
The router topology of the network is fixed (see pen&ink WWW
site). The connection to the main Internet occurs be-tween Router
B and Router C.
Department size.
Each department will have their own unique sub-net and have the
potential for up to 1000 computers.
Public documents
Each department has public documents which are stored locally
within the department, and can be viewed from anyone on the Internet.
Private documents.
Each department has private documents which are stored locally
within the department, and can only be accessed by users in the
other departments.
User files.
Each user will have a home directory, in which they store their
own work, from which they can publish to the private or public
documents folder.
Applications and backup servers.
The distribution of applications should be controlled, and the
installation of software on local com-puters should be minimised.
Robustness.
As much as possible the system should be robust, and their should
be a minimum of disruption when faults occur.
Security.
The company worry about Internet access, and require that users
can only access the Internet if they have the required permission.
Also user computers must be authenticated to the net-work. They
would also prefer that details of their own network are not known
to the outside world.
Administration.
The user computers on each site cannot be access by any other
user's computer, apart from users in the IT Depart-ment, who will
have full access to all the computers.
Other information can be found on the Pen&ink WWW site (http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/~bill/pen_and_ink.html).
Academic
objectives
The academic objectives of the project are:
To design a practical solution to a network operating system.
To investigate alternative solutions to a networking operating
sys-tem, and to be able to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
To be able to present a specification of a solution, including
a re-quirements analysis and requirements specification.
To present background theory to underpins the system solution,
and to show practical implementations of key technical parts of
the project.
 Project
marking
A possible structure for the report could be:
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1
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Introduction [10%]
Objectives, background, methods used. This should
be presented in a form that a Board of Directors could
understand.
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2
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Theory [20%]
Outline of theory which underpins the rest of the
report. Examples could include IP addressing, router programming,
ACLs, distributed file systems, and so on. This should
be presented in a form that a Board of Directors could
understand.
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3
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Requirements Analysis [20%]
Some conceptual design of the system. This will include
an analysis of the main elements of the project, and abstract
models. Dif-ferent implementations should be investigated
and their strengths and weaknesses identified.
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4
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Requirements Specification [35%]
A discussion of the actual proposed system, with important
snip-pets which should the operation of the main elements
of the project.
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5
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Conclusions [15%]
Strong conclusions which summarises your main findings.
This should be presented in a form that a Board of Directors
could understand, and will provide the basis for your
recommendation to the Board of Directors.
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2000/2001
archive
The 2000/2001 project was based around determining
the structure of a practical network. It was decided to change
this for this session as the new project will try and encapsulate
many of the major decisions made when designing and implementing
a networking infrastructure.
[Project 2000/2001]
[FAQs]
Active Directories:
[Active Directories]
[Active
Directories - Microsoft]
[Why
Active Directories? - IT Networks]
[Weaknesses
of Active Directories]
[Good
and bad of AD]
NDS systems:
[NDS
v. AD]
[NetWare 6]
[NDS
v. NT]
General:
[NOS
file system comparisons]
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