Over the next week or so I am planning on releasing a tutorial that will be very large in scope. I still haven’t figured out if I want to do this using open source products or Microsoft products or a combination of the two. Here’s a look at the network I hope to build out during the post .
Click on Link for a larger version of the network Map.
While this might not be the Most complex network out there, this network I will give the user reading the post a good fundamental view on how to start planning a network as well as building it out. Whether it is a house, a renovation, or a building a network. You should always at least have some sort of plan laid out in front of you. If you do make a mistake I guarantee that you will be able to be able to trouble shoot things faster then if you didn’t make a plan.
The network that is laid out above you will give you two separate real world networks. That is, You will have two single networks that will both be connected to an Internet IP address. The reason why I chose to layout my network this way was I wanted to do “REAL WORLD” testing. Using this layout I can actually test a VPN connection inside my own house instead of having to go “Outside” the home network to do the testing.
You might be wondering how I am going to do this. My ISP give out two Dynamic IP address. The first router will actually just be a glorified switch. It will allow Routers 1 and 2 to get their own IP address off the same Internet connection. I am going to be using two fairly fast computers. I am going to make one of the two computers a Virtual server. The other one I will be writing the tutorial from. The Virtual server will have two network cards installed on it. One NIC will be plugged into Router #1 and the other NIC will be plugged into Router #2. Half the Virtual Machines will use a Virtual NIC that using the real NIC #1 and the other half with use a Virtual NIC that uses NIC#2.
We are going to have mail, Web and Files servers each network. I will also have clients in each network.
If this sounds interesting please tune back in a few weeks while I engineer out this network. We will stop and look at security and different ways of doing this along the way. If you bookmark this page I will link to each section as I make them. 
Bruce says
Jared, this looks like a very useful tutorial. It also looks like a large task. I just wondered if the project was still alive?
Jared Heinrichs says
I had forgotten all about it. I have a 18month baby so that has taken time away from a lot of these bigger projects. When I get an a chance to finish it I will ad a comment and you will automatically get an email. That being said there are a bunch of other posts I am sure that you will like. If you have time take a look around 😉