Multiple Switches cross connect or each port into pfsense box
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I completely agree, normally I work it in slowly, once they get used to me helping with stuff, and maybe we go 3 months in when the next quarter and budgets get refreshed I talk to them about what else is needed, second ISP line (they have comcast fiber with a pretty good SLA) redundant routers, that sort of thing, it harder to hit them with it all at once, but I make it clear where the weak spots are and if something happens, they understand. Now I am not onsite, but I am close and have a process to handle emergency issues, they are not a 24x7 place, so that's a little easier.
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0_1535727446039_Floor_Plan.zip
There we go
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So I had another question that is a side note, so I know you guys work for Netgate (maybe not all of you) and they are here to make money, but do you normally not recommend a DIY builds for PFsense? Whats the positive and negatives of a DYI vs Netgate (sorry if this gets a little off this topic).
What do you think of the performance of the SG-1000 how much can it handle user and internet wise? That price sadly for my customers is about the limit they want to spend on routers. (I work with very small customers mom and pop normally that is kinda my nitch most IT guys don't like touching these smaller businesses)
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After a quick look at the plans i’d say you’ll need more than a couple of access points.
I’d get the cabling contractor to run more copper between the network closet and the ceiling, you can always get some long rj45 patch leads to run above the ceiling to the access points.
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I do not work for netgate.. Just a fan and user, been using pfsense since like version 1 ;)
I have personal sg4860 at my house - which sure is a bit over many home budgets. But my buddy got one for his house as well ;)
But there ar some other low cost solutions coming I do believe.. The Minnowboard turbot dual is think in the $250 range..
I do not have personal experience with the sg1000.. I keep meaning to pick up one to play with.. But I always find other toys to blow my IT budget on.. Always have to get such purchases approved by the budget committee (wife).. Lastest was moving up to sg300-28 when got the sg4860..
There are some big fans of DIY.. I ran pfsense on VM for many years - if your customers have say a NAS, that for sure could be an option to running pfsense right on that box vs extra hardware for router. Big fan of the VM solution - especially if you like to play with the dev snapshots.. Since its 30 seconds to rollback if something isn't quite right with the latest build ;)
For those that have limited budgets, as long as they are not rocking high speed/gig interent, etc. you should be fine with the sg1000.
When possible I would always suggest with official hardware.. If your going to go diy, then do that - don't buy these china boxes that come "pre-installed" none of them have the right to do that from my understanding.. So you never know what you might get, etc.
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They really think something they can get at Best Buy is the proper amount of money to spend?
No, I would not use an SG-1000 for this deployment. SG-3100 would be the minimum and I still feel it is inappropriately-small for this installation. Like I said, I would do High-Availability and XG-1537s. Or I would wait for the SG-5100s and use a pair of those.
Sure you can try to roll your own. pfSense runs on most hardware.
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@derelict said in Multiple Switches cross connect or each port into pfsense box:
They really think something they can get at Best Buy is the proper amount of money to spend?
It's unbelievable what some people think is proper networking. A few weeks ago, I was at one company. Their "network" consisted of small consumer grade routers and switches tied together with patch cords running on the floor! The biggest switch had 8 ports, everything else had 4 or 5. There were multiple NATed subnets, which couldn't talk to each other. They even had patch cords that should have been tossed. I cut the end off one, so they'd stop using it. For some strange reason, they were having VoIP problems. At another one, I saw a patch cord held in place with an elastic band wrapped around the plug and switch. Again, they had several small switches, instead of a proper one from Cisco etc.. At least they only had one router/subnet.
I guess some people consider themselves "expert" because they were able to set up a router from Best Buy.
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@jknott said in Multiple Switches cross connect or each port into pfsense box:
because they were able to set up a router from Best Buy.
Heheheeh - yeah they figured out how to put dd-wrt on their linksys.. And now they think they are just a test away from their routing and switching CCIE ;)
I can for sure understand these little ma and pop shops with no IT experience having small budgets... And yeah you can do some pretty neat shit with some cheap gear..
So heres a question - how much are they paying for this gig internet per month? So they think the firewall/router should be less than the monthly isp bill?
The SG5100 would make a nice HA pair for such a setup for sure.. You should pre order your pair now..
Just so we are clear the sg1000 would be ok for a little ma and pop shop with a handful of people, etc.And say a 100/20 cable connection.. A remote worker sort of thing.. I was not suggesting at all you could use that in such a setup.. I was talking about your "ma and pop" sort of setup.. You know the storefront than needs to connect their pos system sort of thing.
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@johnpoz said in Multiple Switches cross connect or each port into pfsense box:
@jknott said in Multiple Switches cross connect or each port into pfsense box:
because they were able to set up a router from Best Buy.
Heheheeh - yeah they figured out how to put dd-wrt on their linksys.. And now they think they are just a test away from their routing and switching CCIE ;)
I can for sure understand these little ma and pop shops with no IT experience having small budgets... And yeah you can do some pretty neat shit with some cheap gear..
So heres a question - how much are they paying for this gig internet per month? So they think the firewall/router should be less than the monthly isp bill?
The SG5100 would make a nice HA pair for such a setup for sure.. You should pre order your pair now..
Just so we are clear the sg1000 would be ok for a little ma and pop shop with a handful of people, etc.And say a 100/20 cable connection.. A remote worker sort of thing.. I was not suggesting at all you could use that in such a setup.. I was talking about your "ma and pop" sort of setup.. You know the storefront than needs to connect their pos system sort of thing.
SG1000 would be for my smaller locations, this plus a AP might be better then using a ASUS device (which is my go to device for the smaller locations) is 100/20 about all it can handle?,
This would not be for this larger call center, as far as this location, I think I am going to do a DYI, I listed the specs in this forum,
you can do HA for this right, two computers built the same with the same specs?
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Have seen it reported doing 185.. 200 prob on a good day.. I don't have one to play with or for sure would do some actual benchmarks.. But I would say if you were on a 150mbps line you prob good with sg1000.. You at 200 prob pushing it.. Over 200 yeah its prob going to be a bottleneck..
Also take into account number of users... Just because you were on 100/20 doesn't mean fine for 100 users ;)
How much you going to spend on the parts for your DIY... Then time putting it together, setup, testing, etc..
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I assumed a double door width was 1.5 m
Heat map @ 5Ghz
AP power 2.4 Ghz 11 dBm & 5 Ghz 15 dBm using Cisco 3600i access points.
Red -45 dBm
Orange -55 dBm
Green -65 dBmBlue -75 dBm << not good
The issue is the offices bottom left.
If you mark where you intend to put 2 access points I can show you the heat map.
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@johnpoz said in Multiple Switches cross connect or each port into pfsense box:
Have seen it reported doing 185.. 200 prob on a good day.. I don't have one to play with or for sure would do some actual benchmarks.. But I would say if you were on a 150mbps line you prob good with sg1000.. You at 200 prob pushing it.. Over 200 yeah its prob going to be a bottleneck..
Also take into account number of users... Just because you were on 100/20 doesn't mean fine for 100 users ;)
How much you going to spend on the parts for your DIY... Then time putting it together, setup, testing, etc..
So I don't have any customers with more then 10 users (this call center not withstanding), so this might work pretty well, fastest internet my customers have normally is about 250mbs, so this would work well, and its nice a small, plus it disconnects my wifi from the router so I can place the wifi is better locations.
As far as the build, I am able to build it out for about $350 with no OS ($150 profit) I resell a pretty decent amount of computers (I have home users too) so I always have parts and I buy them in bulk, so my thought is if the PS, MB, Ram, SSD on the router where to fail, I can pretty easily swap it out and have it up in running in very little time, and I can get the performance of a i3 with 8gb ram. I could make a bit more if I go with a Pentium CPU (kaby lake), but I want to ensure there is enough speed to make the router not the bottle neck.
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Here you go. I can put in a few more (I told the customer that 2 was probably not going to cut i, that we could check it out after the install)0_1535742469899_Floor Plan.zip
This location is wide open, other then the offices, most of the office entries are glass (doors). The APs will be installed on the ceiling tiles
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@manwdaplan said in Multiple Switches cross connect or each port into pfsense box:
So I had another question that is a side note, so I know you guys work for Netgate (maybe not all of you) and they are here to make money, but do you normally not recommend a DIY builds for PFsense? Whats the positive and negatives of a DYI vs Netgate (sorry if this gets a little off this topic).
What do you think of the performance of the SG-1000 how much can it handle user and internet wise? That price sadly for my customers is about the limit they want to spend on routers. (I work with very small customers mom and pop normally that is kinda my nitch most IT guys don't like touching these smaller businesses)
Regarding DIY boxes, I have at ton of them, and they all work great.
One of those is an old dual-core AMD circa 2010 desktop that I put a pair of Intel NICs into (plus the on-board NIC). It's been running for about 5 years now without a single hiccup. It handles about 40 office PCs and about 100 WiFi devices.
At my new day job, I started a little VPN project to connect some new branch offices to our HQ and used some old HP Core2 desktops that were no longer in service. Worked like a charm. I ended up replacing those with the new XG-7100 after the initial research phase was done. (I wish I had waited for the SG-5100)
I'm not suggesting you use an old desktop, I'm just saying that a basic pfS setup doesn't need a ton of CPU or RAM.
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Call center. Any VoIP? To the outside?
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@manwdaplan said in Multiple Switches cross connect or each port into pfsense box:
about $350 with no OS ($150 profit)
So what your worried about is your profit margin ;) on the hardware..
https://www.netgate.com/partners/
Your reselling them - so I would look to becoming partner with netgate.. I have to think that there is some markup that is shared for reselling product.. Prices on the store have to be end user price, not reseller price.. I would look into that option maybe..
Core Benefits
Competitive Profit Margins: We encourage our partners to deliver their high margin professional services (design, deployment and support) and we will give you the training, support, cost-competitive appliances and access to other technologies that help you win business goals.
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This use a app on the macs for VOIP services, and blue tooth headsets.
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@nogbadthebad said in Multiple Switches cross connect or each port into pfsense box:
Can you suggest where to put 4 of the APs, I can get two more without issue.
Thanks
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@manwdaplan Do you have VoIP trunks to the outside? Outside "cloud" PBX? Anything like that?
Kind of hard to believe they are skimping so hard on a site deployment of this scale. Do they not care if it works or not?
