Maximum PC

Hello:

I have a few questions for all of you networking experts out there. I understand the fundamental concepts of networking in a home/office environment. I have been studying to get my Net+ certification and will then be moving on to my MCSE. I wanted to take the time to get some BASIC questions out of the way and would appreciate any feedback/responses. The questions are as follows:

1) Using a simple scenario, an office building has two floors with 100 computers on each floor. The first floor handles all accounting and financial data for the company and connects to a data backup server or file server. The second floor handles all research and development for the company and it too has its own dedicated data backup server or file server. This company uses a standard T3 connection to get out to the internet. I am assuming it would be wise to assign two subnets to the network (1 for each floor) to help avoid any traffic congestion and improve data flow/reliability?

2) In conjunction with question 1, using two subnets (1 for each floor), how would they need to be physically connected? For example, 1 router per floor, depending on how many ports the router has?

3) Being two separate sub-networks, how would they physically be connected to be able to get out to the internet and communicate with each other or each floor? In a basic scenario, using a basic router, you would have your cable/dsl modem plugged into the router, and the router would have DCHP enabled to assign local IP addresses. I understand you cannot have two routers both using DHCP due to address assignment conflicts (using 1 internet connection). Keep in mind, I want both subnetworks or floors to be able to communicate with each other and be able to access the internet. How would these routers be configured? I would like details on how the cable configuration or layout would be and any router settings that would make this possible.

Since two subnets would be used, each router would have to be configured using the appropriate subnet mask. Also, being each router needs to know its primary gateway to be able to access the internet, and we only have 1 internet connection, how would these two routers be configured? Moving back to a basic setup, if you connect an additional router to a network that uses 1 internet connection, DHCP would need to be disabled, making it a problem for managing this sized network of at least 200 hosts. Granted, I'm sure there is a workaround using this scenario and not comparing this to a home/office setup. But I'm trying to keep it basic.

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So moving along, I'm just looking for a basic answer on how this would be done physically and logically (I welcome sketches/pictures ). Keep in mind, one T3 internet connection, 2 floors with 100 hosts per floor with each floor using its own dedicated server. All hosts and equipment must be able to access the internet and communicate locally with each other. What's the cable setup and all router/network settings to accomplish this? Granted, I realize this is a broad scenario and many, many factors could come into play.

Your assistance would be appreciated and if I've repeated myself a few time, I'm sorry. I'm looking forward to your responses.

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