Packet Tracer - Physical Simulation

We discovered some of the realism to Packet Tracer and how it treats wireless.

As our building is multi-floored, we wanted to be able to show the physical layout of devices and their wireless coverage.

Packet tracer does not allow a building with more than one floor, so we created 5 individual buildings to represent each floor.

This let our building have good wireless coverage, without risk of channels overlapping and causing interference. 

One unexpected realistic part of packet tracer was the length of cable that can transmit. As each floor was linked to the Central switch via copper cabling, the connection would start to drop if the connection was more than 100 meters apart in physical view. To help alleviate this issue, we decided to put the Central switch and main router on floor 3, making floors 1 & 5 evenly far away.

Presentation Preparation

We created a slide show demonstrating various parts of our project for the first practice preparation.

By using Google Drive, we were able to modify the slides on any computer with Internet access, proving valuable able to work at home.

We created slides covering the objective, methods of organisation, the creation of both the District & Baratiwa network and finally a progress update.

As a group we discussed that we would require more preparation on presenting for the final.

Progress with CCNA

Friday passed was quite a big day as we learned that there was a project progress report in the next week so not only do we have to keep going we've also got to catch up on some CCNA4 labs as well as the test we have for PC Engineering 2 and now we have to prepare a small presentation of how far we've come. as for the project itself Baratiwa school itself is pretty much complete, main things left are security and some extras. I showed Tavita the wireless problem i encountered and it turns out packet tracer physically put all the access points in the same wiring cabinet so after making new "corporate offices" as floors we got the wireless working pretty well with no extra problems so far. Another interesting packet tracer feature is that it stays true to the roughly 100m distance that an ethernet cable can travel before signal starts to fade.

Packet tracer dosent currently support VTP pruning  or true redundancy features yet but we talked it over with the customer and are going to state in the report that in a real life situation we would have done that.