General Considerations for IP Addressing

The building floor plan and the instructional organization of the building may be useful to consider when assigning IP addresses. The instructional use of the rooms (grade level, subject area, labs, and libraries), the physical layout of the building (floors, wings, and halls) and other factors (administrative use, support staff use, and locations of network wiring closets) may provide some useful framework to develop an IP addressing plan.

In order to maintain a logical IP addressing system as the network grows and more computers are installed, a certain number of IP addresses may be reserved for each classroom or computer lab. For example, room #1 may be assigned IP addresses 10.x.x.31 - 10.x.x.60, then room #2 may be assigned 10.x.x.61 - 10.x.x.90.

Rooms that are expected to have less students may need only 10 or 20 IP addresses assigned.

A numbering scheme like this would allow for eventually having a computer for the teacher and for every student, and a file server and a print server in every classroom, and possibly an ethernet telephone and a TV programmed through an ethernet port.

By assigning IP addresses this way, when a new computer is received, it will be easy to determine what IP address it will be assigned according to the list of addresses reserved for that room. Since Internet activity can usually be traced back to an IP address, it will be easy to determine the room in which any activity originated. Access to servers and other network resources can be limited to specific ranges of IP addresses which is another consideration when assigning IP addresses.

A school with 1000 students will be assigned 4,094 addresses which is the equivalent of 16 Class C subnets. The first 30 addresses of each 254 are being reserved for network requirements. The remaining 225 addresses X 16 = 3600 IP addresses to assign to individual workstations. This would accommodate 100 classrooms with 30 addresses each and 600 more addresses for guidance offices, administrative offices, lunchroom cash registers and other uses.

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