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Planning your IP address scheme
Designing the overall layout of your network is an incredibly important process that 
sets the stage for success or failure later on. This design must take into consideration 
the needs of the organization, the need for efficient methods of communication, 
and the segregation of network services to ensure that your servers can only 
communicate with the resources that they are supposed to. As a Linux administrator 
that manages a fleet of Ubuntu servers, it's not always the case that you'll even have 
a say in the network layout at all. It's quite common that you "inherit" a network 
designed by a previous administrator, or your job is siloed such that you only 
manage the servers and someone else is responsible for the network.
Since this is primarily a book that focuses on teaching you how to manage Ubuntu 
servers, we aren't going to cover all of the things that a network administrator would 
need to know, but there's quite a bit of common knowledge between the two roles. 
As a Linux administrator, you may or may not be tasked with the designing of your 
network, but at a minimum, you do need to understand the overall layout and how 
your servers will fit within it.
In this section, we'll discuss the most important part of a network layout—the IP 
address scheme. Planning the IP scheme is an important task that sets the foundation 
for many other things. Even if it's not up to you to design this layout, knowing 
the finer details can help you understand the weaknesses when something goes 
wrong. Planning your IP layout involves estimating how many devices will need to 
connect to your network and being able to support them. In addition, a good plan 
will account for potential growth and allow expansion as well. The main thing that 
factors into this is the size of your user base. Perhaps you are working in a small 
office with only a handful of people, or a large corporation with thousands of users 
and hundreds of virtual machines. Even if your organization is only a small office, 
I always recommend making the assumption that your company will explode in 
popularity someday and designing your network to have the growth potential to 
accommodate that.
Typically, most off-the-shelf routers and network equipment come with an 
integrated