The Saugus Union School District reached the Network World Renovator Award finals for a wide-ranging network overhaul that involved laying a foundation of 100/1000M bit/sec Ethernet, installing IP-based telephony, delivering on-demand video and migrating 50 servers from Novell NetWare to Red Hat Linux.

Saugus Union's network revamp project started with the school's network team creeping around in wiring closets and wiring ducts in the 16 elementary, middle and high schools, and ripping out old network gear.

"We had some ancient stuff," says Jim Klein, director of information services and technology for the school district in California.

Klein's goal, when the project began two years ago, was a converged voice, video and data network that could be centrally managed and monitored.

The first step was taking out 10-year-old Bay Network 10Base-T hubs and various 10Base-2 coaxial cable links that tied together some school buildings. The 128K bit/sec ISDN-based WAN also had to go, he says.

Klein built the foundation of the school's new multi-service network on Fast and Gigabit Ethernet switches from 3Com: Switch 4900s in the core of each building fanning out to SuperStack 3 switches in wiring closets. Whereas network problems used to require trips to the trouble sites, the 3Com gear let Klein manage the network from his office.

The school also upgraded its WAN with point-to-point T-1 lines anchored by Cisco routers.

With the foundation in place, Klein could next tackle delivering VoIP. In the past, the school only had phones in certain administrative offices, he says. The network renovation plan called for putting a 3Com IP phone in each room and tying together all schools with free IP calling over the WAN.

But the project got tricky because telephony traffic had to run through firewalls using network address translation (NAT). The 3Com phones use Layer 2 media access control addresses to route calls over the LAN; IP addresses are picked up from a DHCP server on the 3Com NBX servers when routed over an IP WAN. When they hit the NAT wall, calls dropped because the IP addresses of the phones were changed, Klein says.

To get around the problem, Klein configured his 3Com switches to route the calls over the point-to-point T-1 links, bypassing the firewalls.