Designing Access Controls

Lay Out the Network

Start your network core design with central network resources—your net- work’s servers, which might include:

Directory servers (Active Directory, eDirectory, or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol [LDAP] servers) that can serve as the credential/policy repositories

RADIUS servers (the PDPs)

N o t e

As you learned in “Choose Which Devices Will Play the Role of PDP” on

 

page 3-79,your RADIUS servers might be instead built into edge devices.

 

 

Proxy servers and firewalls

ProCurve NAC 800 MSs

ProCurve NAC 800 ESs that enforce 802.1X quarantining or act as RADIUS servers only

Web servers

Email servers

Video streaming server

Databases

Note that these central resources do not all have to be in the same location, even if you define them as part of the network core segment. For example, if you have multiple RADIUS servers to provide load balancing and redundancy, you might place them in different buildings on your campus to minimize the chance of fire or accident taking them all down at once.

Next, add the core switches. You need to provide high-capacity, Layer-3 switching to route traffic among the various VLANs. ProCurve offers several types and capacities of core-grade switches, so your decision will depend on your capacity needs. For example, you might choose the ProCurve Switch 8200zl for the central routing switches, and you might connect banks of servers to the ProCurve Switch 5400zl.

Although all these servers might be part of the network core, they need not be in the same VLAN. In the earlier planning steps, you designed server VLANs that separate resources according to the users who need to access them. As you connect servers to their switches, configure the switch ports for the correct server VLAN.

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