Physical connectivity (Layer 2)

The technologies used are:
• Switched Ethernet
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Wireless networking (802.11b)

There is no use of ATM, FDDI or other “older” technologies. The network is purely Ethernet. IEEE 802.1q VLANs are supported by the network equipment.

Routing and Logical subnets (Layer 3)

The hybrid Layer 2/3 routing equipment is composed of Alcatel OSR and Omnicore L2/L3, with approximately 15 internal IPv4 subnets (in effect, routed VLANs). There is no specific internal routing protocol used. There is a static route via the site firewall to the main upstream provider (academic) running at 1Gbit/s, and there is also a static route to the secondary (low bandwidth) link offsite (commercial).

Hard coded IP information:

• The IPv4 address space assigned by academic provider
• There is hardcoded IP subnet information
• IP addresses for static route targets

Firewall

The firewall is currently a CheckPoint Firewall-1 solution running on a Nokia IP740 hardware platform. There is one internal facing interface, one external facing interface, and two “DMZ” interfaces, one for wired hosts and one for the Wireless LAN provision.

Hard coded IP information:

• Names resolved to IP addresses in FW-1 at “compilation” time
• IP addresses in remote firewalls allowing access to remote services
• IP-based authentication in remote systems allowing access to online bibliographic resources