Understanding Network Connectivity
For this assignment, I interviewed Russel Taboso who is the Telecommunications Manager at the Hudson County Community College (HCCC). At the beginning of the interview Russel mentioned that a lot of the information on HCCC network is confidential and that he would answer my questions without giving out some of the sensitive information.
Our college has two campuses, the campus where I work is in Jersey City and the other campus is in Union City. The campus where I work in Jersey City has eight buildings and each building has a network setup, including wireless access. This enables students, faculty and staff to access the information necessary for their work.
I work at the Center for Distance Education where I have access to all of my files through the network. My computer is connected to a patch panel via a network cable. The patch panel is then connected to a switch that in turn is connected to a router. This router acts as a relay between all of the computers on the network and the external world. The router is connected to a firewall that prevents any unsafe data and malicious attacks. Through the firewall, the router is connected to our Internet Service Provider (ISP). This allows the college to acquire IP addresses to be able to connect to the internet.
As a computer user, I have the following permissions: I am able to log in to a computer on our internal network with my user id and password; check my e-mails, run the applications necessary for my work; print documents to a printer on my network and access the intranet website and the internet.
I cannot install new applications on my computer, map network drives or delete and applications or system files. Only the network administrator at our school has the necessary permissions to perform these tasks. I have no access to unsolicited website or applications not approved by the college. There is a proxy server for e-mail and internet that has network filters installed that guard the security of our data. We also have an email filter that checks all incoming and outgoing emails and filters out the potentially hazardous ones.
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| Zuany's Desktop Network Map |
