Here's my work network: Aside from some older existing infrastructure, most of which I've rebuild over the past couple of years.
We've got three buildings.
This is our rack in the office:
Top to bottom:
- UPS
- PFSense box
- SG300-28P
- SG100-24
-(right: CradlePoint AER2100)
- Lenovo TD230, redundant AD domain controller and backup target server
- Lenovo RD630, hyper-v hypervisor, 48GB of ram, 8x300GB 2.5 10krpm Lenovo branded Seagate Sas drives, 8x640GB 7.2krpm Sata 2.5 WD blacks, two raid controller cards.
left, AC, flex conduit going to our production building.
I only have about 6 VMS in hyper-v.
domain controller, our main storage server (8x640gb drives in raid 10. looking back at it, i should have made it raid 60. but oh well too late now.), elastix server as backup for sending faxes over ip only.
as well as some other VMs i won't mention here.
Production building Demarc. wall:
top to bottom:
- left, shaw cable demarc. middle: shaw cable modem, ip phone hacked for PA use (speakerphone connected directly to PA amplifier (littl gray box to right))
- left, cisco SG300-28PP, right: cisco UC540 router and iphone system i've installed. i regred going with UC540. do not buy it.
- UPS 1000G
in the same building we have a fiber media converter, with fiber going underground to our 3rd building:
This is something that was inherited from the previous owner of this lot. (Telus used to have one of its offices where they sent technicians out of.).
- fiber cable has multiple fibers in it as you can see on the left. but only 2 are being used.
- the media converter is old, duplexer limited to 10mbit
Third building, has the same box as above and same duplexer media converter, also has this we've inherited, but unfortunately it would cost too much for us to have it connected, (yes I am crying on the inside)
I have a mini-network under my desk:
reason being, my machine is a E32 workstation with i7-4770, 16GB ram, 240gb ssd for OS and 2x1tb drives, two network adapters, and nvidia k2000 2gb GPU
win10 pro.
I run hyper-v with clonezilla DRBL server.
The left monitor on my desk is for imaging computers. for now I just have a 4port kvm.
We've been planning to deploy the CradlePoint AER2100 as our edge router with LTE failover only for out ip phones. (we have no POTS left here)
but I came to hate CradlePoint device and the company. hate is a bit of a strong word here, but every other feature in the firmware is "licensable" meaning you need a separate subscription for additional routing protocols, separate for better security, and separate subscription for warranty (yes device comes with 0 warranty), separate subscription for cloud management. Customer service is absurd, and really bad. Their cloud subscription covers 10 devices, but they do not tell you this, and I found this out by accident when I was exploring it after the fact. they've sweet talked us and got us excited with the 4g lte failover and how amazing the device is. anyway. disclaimer: CradlePoint hardware really is great. But seems like they cater to big enterprises with many micro branches and or kiosks. But not a good choice for single entity small business. Routing features are fairly limited.
So. I've decided to use PFSense for our edge, and it will be connected to Cradlepoint for failover. I just haven't done the switch yet.
UC540, is 100Mbit. and is quite a bottleneck in our network. Thanks to ARP tables on the switches, most of our workstation to server communication doesn't even touch the router. But everything else, and the internet traffic is bottlenecked.
We pay for 50mbit. UC540 bottlenecks it down to 30mbps at absolute best.
PFsense on that old dell (what u see in pic is what it is, it has not been modified or upgraded, other than using old 60gb ssd for pfsense image).
anyway PF sense on that dell gives me full 50+ mbit path to shaw.
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