External VPN Access Problems - Firewall Cluster - Computer Science Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Introduction:

Upon being notified of the network issues being experienced by inter-office staff, external clients and our roaming employees, I inspected the network diagram and have developed a thesis if you may, and several theories why this may be happening. I theorize that there could be possible faults, either physical and/or configuration related to the primary router and the FW-1 firewall cluster.

Background:

Our network diagram shows us that we have a primary router, with a speed of 10mb. This primary router is at the forefront of the network and everything. We then look down the chain and can see that before the DMZ, we have a firewall cluster that is responsible for the security of all traffic that flows through from above. 

As we go further down the chain, we have a secondary firewall, followed by an internal router, through to a switch device, then that feeds the data through to our users, on-premises servers and other network devices. 

While this setup is adequate in the way of layout and design, I fear that it may not be the same story with efficiency. I believe our problem may lie at the top of the chain with the primary router and possibly the cluster firewall. My reasons for this assumption are that everything below relies on everything above functioning properly and efficiently. If something was to go wrong with our primary router, we are talking about a single point of failure where everything below will suffer.

What I believe may be occurring, I will list below then outline a plan of attack
Our primary router may be overloaded with an excess of traffic that it simply cannot handle which could lead to our customers experiencing issues when attempting to access the webserver. The physical capabilities should be investigated after the reports come through.
Our primary router could have a physical fault or an internal fault with its configuration and settings. If this is the case, this would also explain the external customer complaints. This would also explain the external VPN access problems. Any false DNS settings would see external connections denied.
If Our first line of defense firewall is experiencing issues with its configuration, it could be blocking all external traffic. The switches on the firewall are also “Active / Active” and one could very well be down.
With regards to the internet speed in the office, I believe this would be related to an overload of traffic “choking” our primary router, then this filtering down the line to affect our mail server and our users. Another possibility is that the user traffic on our network is particularly high at this point. We may have management on conference calls and a fair chunk of our employees all accessing the server at once which will inevitably slow down the lines. 

Recommendations:
I’d first like to have a quick chat with Rolf and Peter to set their minds at ease and to let them know that I’m assembling a team to assess all areas of concern. I will be liaising with the security engineer team to have them run some tests on the physical hardware and review event logs on the hardware to see any unexpected shutdown or critical errors, followed by the network manager to request they run some tests on the network to check for volume of access from internal and external users. Logs from both these teams will be requested for perusal. Lastly, I will be recruiting the security admin team to double-check our firewall. Some obscure settings could easily be causing us grief. 

It’s a long shot, but it would also be a good idea to have the network administration team to check if the domain name has been blacklisted. A blacklisted domain would cause a website to not be available to an end-user, as well as mail exchange emails not getting to recipients.

Once this has all been completed and our teams have reported their findings, I can construct a plan based on those findings and file my report to our CIO.

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