Recent content by Mike Bailey

Apologies in advance for formatting, I am typing on a train :) Do yourself a favor or and buy multiple fiber pairs. Pick up OFNP/Plenum rated, UPC (unpolished connector), single mode fiber with LC connectors. Why? Plenum is the standard required for in-laws installations. UPC connectors are...

Anyone know any other options? I have a pair of LB4Ms that I was playing around with but they suck down power and generate a ton of heat and noise. The other route I was looking was picking up a pair of 3560G as these are relatively light on power and noise by comparison. A nice plus is they...

Just be aware that if you're running routing in pfSense, you're going to take a latency and throughput hit. I don't know what set of hardware you'll be running the pfSense on, but the LB4M / LB6M are be line rate forwarding and routing. With routing in the LB6M, you won't have an inter-VLAN...

Are you talking about the Catalyst 4000 series? Those need line cards (for ports) and supervisors (for control logic). Even if you get a console cable, if you don't have a supervisor installed it's useless.

I'm looking for a simple briding cellular modem that I can just set up and plug (via Ethernet) into a router. Nothing fancy, just 3G/4G in one end, unadulterated ethernet traffic out the other end. I see stuff like the TP-Link TL-MR3040 that you can plug a USB 3G/4G modem (like the TP-Link...

Yep, make sure you configure it as L3 ahead of time. Once it comes online, it will have nothing but the stock config on it. I've been running one in my switch core in L3 and I haven't really noticed any significant latency impact. A cursory ping between two routed networks on the device shows...

@Patrick: What stack are you running for the actual forum software? If I had to guess, it's unlikely the VM itself generates much in the way of anything beyond incremental DB changes and some logs. Just guessing, logs might be no more than 100 MB a day, if that. Database changes? Easily not a...

@F1ydave: Once you move to 2012 R2, it'll be smooth sailing :) The Microsoft ecosystems in recent years (with the exception of licensing..) has been rather pain-free for me.

@Patrick, I assume you mean this guy? No, I've not heard of it before. I tend to like the 2651XM + NM-32A combo because you can usually pick it up for about $80 on ebay. I've set it up a couple times at my current workplace because of how cost effective it is.

I'm doing it the lazy way: I have a simple switch that supports port mirroring. Check the first post, I have the L2 diagram of how it's going to be configured. I have to do some testing still, but preliminary it looks like I can push the expected 100 mbps (50 up / 50 down) through my switch...

Stick with the console. I have one serving as my network core at the moment (upgrading to ES-48-Lite soon). I don't even bother with the web console anymore. If you've used Cisco hardware (not linksys rebrand), the CLI is IOS which works OK. You can do what I did: Pick up a Cisco 2651xM, an...

I would throw a virtual appliance on my virtual hosts, but the way the network will end up getting segmented is going to look horrendous. I'd rather have a dedicated appliance (that can go offline / reboot / die) that isn't wasting bandwidth in my network core, just a tiny bit at the network...

I had actually thought about that and completely forgot that they sold hardware for this.. I'm looking for something that I can just set up, stuff in my network cabinet, and forget about it. The SG-2220 would actually work perfect for what I'm looking to do. I won't be pushing more than 50 mbps...

I figured there was other software as well. It's very rare for someone to set up a system and go "**** it, it's already there let's install something else as well." I'm sure everyone here has been guilty of this at some point :) Any idea of what kind of applications run on it? It might be...

I have no need to run anything else on this platform, I already have dedicated infrastructure for that. I considered it, but even a D-1520 is way too much ($400 for the motherboard + proc alone). The node I'm deploying is going to be fully exposed on the WAN so I'm looking to segregate it...