Getting 100 Girls on the Internet

[Thavion Hawk]

Hi all. Figure I'd get some eyes on this crazy job I'm about to go one tomorrow and let you all in on the mess that has been getting it ready. I work at a small computer store in a college town and once in a blue moon we do some work for one of the fraternities or sororities. This is evidently one of those blue moons as we got called up to do a full network deployment for a sorority that's moving into a fraternities vacated house. The Frat moved out for what ever reason and the property/holding company that manages the sorority contacted us about setting up the internet because obviously the frat took their hardware with them.

 

Now for those of you that don't live in Oregon you might find the fact that College is only just now getting into session. Schools in Oregon start and end later than others because of the close ties to agriculture in the area. Oregon State University was and still is a Agricultural Sciences College. I bring this up because the students are still moving in for the semester exlaining why we got called in to do the networking just last Monday for deployment tomorrow(Friday the 22nd)

 

So back to the on site assessment. I expected that the frat house had been at some point updated with networking and thankfully it had. Most if not all the rooms are patched down to a closet  on the second floor including the entertainment area in the basement. The plan is simple enough: Replace the old HP 10/100 Switch with a nice new Gigabit one, Setup four Wireless AP's(One on each floor) with AP Hopping, put it all behind a nice new Firewall/Router and get a good enough Internet connection run in for the 40/100 College Girls to be online all at once...

 

Problems: The old Switch and Patch panel have no Port Map so we don't know where the wires go from the closet, Not knowing the quality of the wiring in the house or where they all go we can't use Power Over Ethernet for the AP's so we need to Power the AP's where they will be deployed(Turns out the shipped without power bricks because POE support so we had to find some that would work in 24/hours and eat the cost) And Comcast only offers up to 250Mbps down over Copper with a month or more lead time for Fiber to the Closest to get anything faster.

 

Now for my home internet 200-250Mbps is fine, but for 40+ girls watching Youtube at the same time? Nope not going to cut it. The only option to get them fast enough service is to run Two Modems into a Dual WAN Firewall(Why not just a single Modem with 32 Channel that can run 1Gbps? Because Comcast)

 

Here's the final plan we ended up with.

A Dual WAN Linksys LRT224 Router

Four Netgear ProSAFE WAC720 AP's with Ensemble (Their decentralized Mesh Control System)

A 50 Port Netgear M4100-50G Switch (Not the POE Version because as said above we don't trust POE)

Four APC Battery Backups. (One each for the AP's with the Router, Switch and Modem sharing the AP in the closet.)

 

If you all have any input on this feel free to give, but know that all the hardware is bought and will be going in at 9am PST tomorrow. I just thought I'd throw up this craziness.

 

Oh yeah some of the girls already found the network ports in their rooms and had their computers plugged into them. When I got there for the on-site evaluation they cheered and called me the Internet Guy. That was fun.

 

[James7176]

All hail the internet guy

[MorganO]

9 minutes ago, Thavion Hawk said:

-SNIP-

 

the title is click bait

[Windows7ge]

That's quite the project. You could have traced each wire individually (though it would have been time consuming) and I know POE has a limitation on how long the wires can be (something in the range of 175ft?) so with that in mind local power for the AP's is probably better. Using two routers and two WAN ports is beyond my knowledge. Depending on how that's setup I guess you'd be using a NAT pool but I'm not sure how load would be distributed between the two routers. There's also the issue of handling DHCP.

 

If you know it'll work then great. Too bad the cables weren't labeled and you couldn't get a single fiber or coax line to handle the load.

[Levisallanon]

only feedback I could give is:
Leave your phone number behind in case they need you for anything ;).

[NZLaurence]

Get a tone tester and do it right label and test the cables. With two people you could easily test them all and label them in less then an hour. It will save you heaps of time in the future. Also just order the fibre and put a single connection in for now for the same reason.

PoE is fine to the full 100m.

[Pixel5]

everything seems fine beside the battery´s, if the power goes off having the routers running is not really an issue unless it only affects the one room they are in and not the whole building.

[Thavion Hawk]

I really didn't think about the title of this post and how it could be kind of click batty...

As for an update. The hardware went in fine with all the pre-configuring I did yesterday holding. All I had to do was change passwords so that people couldn't just drop admin/admin, admin/password or in one case just admin with no password to get into the networking hardware.

 

The only real headache came when I realized some/most of the patch cables from the old switch to the patch panel are way too short for me to put the new switch where I'd planned too. I had to put it on top of the old switch and creatively manage the cables to make them all reach.

 

As of this morning I can honestly say I got 100 College Girls Online and mean nothing dirty when saying it.

[paddy-stone]

1 hour ago, Thavion Hawk said:

I really didn't think about the title of this post and how it could be kind of click batty...

As for an update. The hardware went in fine with all the pre-configuring I did yesterday holding. All I had to do was change passwords so that people couldn't just drop admin/admin, admin/password or in one case just admin with no password to get into the networking hardware.

 

The only real headache came when I realized some/most of the patch cables from the old switch to the patch panel are way too short for me to put the new switch where I'd planned too. I had to put it on top of the old switch and creatively manage the cables to make them all reach.

 

As of this morning I can honestly say I got 100 College Girls Online and mean nothing dirty when saying it.

 

The one thing I got from this is:- guys living there are fine with no fibre or multiple lines, girls move in and they get the best

 

Only kidding^^  - but does kind of suggest that is all. So OP, does this mean you'll have to go back in a month and install the fibre modem? or are they not getting fibre?

 

[Thavion Hawk]

They ended up getting a 150mbps down cable line. I don't know if they are going to get fiber at this point but we installed a dual wan router and they can get up to 250mbps on that one modem so what ever they end up doing it's ready for them. As for what was there before, the frat may have had better internet but I'll never know because all that was left was the switch and patch panel.