Welcome to this module activity on securing your network. In this activity, I'll ask you to think about the conceptual computer system that you built in Module 1 in this course. Now think about the environment that that particular system will operate in. Maybe it's your home office, or maybe it's an office space in a commercial building. We'll think through some of the network security that's required or recommended to secure that environment in the best way possible. In this module activity, we're asking you to create a sample diagram of what that configuration might look like, as well as describing some of those choices in a brief paragraph. In this video, I want to introduce you to a tool called Lucidchart. You can get a free version of this tool. If you just go to lucidchart.com, you can sign up for a free version, and that will be sufficient enough to create the simple network diagram that will create for this module activity. Once you've gone through the registration process and you have your free account setup, you should land on your dashboard in the Lucid App. What we'll do here is click on the "New" button on the left-hand side, and we'll tell the system that we want a Lucidchart document. This will essentially give us a blank Canvas on which we can start our simple network diagram. You may see some getting started tips pop up when you first log in here. You can feel free to look at those or you can skip those tips. Here we have our blank Canvas, and this is where we'll start. I'm dragging in different components or shapes onto our diagram. I'll walk through a brief example with you, and so I will conceptually think through what a home network might look like to put my computer system on and what else might sit on that network. Please keep in mind, I don't want you to add any sensitive information here. No public IP addresses, obviously no usernames or passwords for any of the networking components that exist on your system, whether it's real or hypothetical. We'll keep this generic and high level as we walk through the example here. In my example on the left-hand side here are lots of shapes that you can use on your diagram. There's a really helpful Search button here, so I'll search for Internet because ultimately my network is connected to an Internet. You'll see lots of examples here that you can bring to your Canvas. Some of them will be grayed out if you're using the free version, and that just means we can't use those particular shapes. I'm looking for potentially something with some color to it, although some of these are just not colored. I know that I can use this one as an example for my Internet. I'm just going to drop that on my Canvas. If I double-click on it, I can change the name. I'm just going to call this Internet. That'll be my Internet shape on my diagram. From my Internet on my home network, that then goes into a modem from my high-speed broadband provider. Let's search here for modem, and maybe you have a cable modem or whatever you might have, I'll just use this basic modem shape. We know we have a modem coming from that provider. Then for my network, I then go into a wireless router because I don't like using the one that's built into that modem. Next, I'll look for a router, and this is what's going to let me wirelessly connect various devices to my network. Here's a wireless router shape. Here's that one that looks good. In my wireless router, I have a firewall configured. So let me search for a firewall. All of these concepts should be familiar to you if you've gone through this module already. The way I'll represent this is that firewall is attached to my wireless router. Let me double-click on wireless router here and give that label wireless router. Then you can label the firewall if you want to. Firewall is typically represented by a brick wall like this. Now, let's bring in a couple of computers here on our network. From the wireless router, I may have some hardware components that are plugged in to that router. They would be plugged in with an Ethernet cable. Let's find a couple of PCs. Here we go. Here's a PC shape. There's a computer on the network and there's a computer on the network. What I'll do now, if you hover over a shape, you'll get these dots around that shape, and if you go to one of those dots and drag a line, you can point a line to another shape. We'll do that. Notice there's an arrow there indicating that there's something coming from the wireless router to this computer, but really this is two-way communication. You can either have arrows going both ways or just don't have the arrows there. The way you change those options is up here in this toolbar. You can see that on the left side, there's no arrow, on the right side, we have an arrow. For simplicity, I'm just going to remove the arrow there. That will give me two-way communication between the computer and the wireless router. Then I want to do the same thing to this computer. Again, I'll take the arrow away and then I might label this. I just double-click to get a text and I'll call this Ethernet. These will be computers that are physically plugged in to my router. I might call this one PC 2 and PC 3. The reason is because I'm going to have PC 1 connected wirelessly. Let's go to wireless. Let's say, well, we have another PC, so we'll have that. I'll draw the lines here in a moment. Let's put a wireless printer on our network. Let's see. I have a printer, I have at least one smartphone I know. I may have many more devices than this, but there's a smartphone on my wireless network and I might have a couple of laptops. Let's grab a couple of laptops, put those on the wireless network. You can see, I'm just creating a pretty rough diagram here, but this will help me to visualize what my network looks like. Now these are wireless, so I don't want to show wires here, but what I can do, same concept, click on one of these bubbles and drag to another component. But now I'll still take away the arrow, but I also don't want a solid line here, I'm going to use a dotted line to show that there is a connection there, but it's wireless. I'll do that for each of these systems that are just connected, all wirelessly connecting to my home network. Then we can label all of these. This might be Laptop 1 and Laptop 2. That one's already labeled smartphone. This we'll call PC 1, and then we have a printer on the wireless network. I have got a couple more lines here to draw. We're going to go between the router and the modem. Again, you can have arrows going in both direction to show that communication is going both ways or you can just take the arrows away. Just as an example, I'll leave the arrow this time. We're adding the other end. Here we go. Now you can see communication between my endpoints, all of my computers, my devices, my smartphones, and getting all the way through to the Internet and how that works for security. I've got a firewall in there and then obviously, there's some basic security tied into the wireless router as well. That's an example of building our network configuration and showing some of the security that's built in using our free tool Lucidchart.
