CISCO

drak3 · 10 May 2008 at 11:07

Any network egnineers with experience on cisco care to reccomend me which range I should be looking at for the following application:

- 1 WAN (plan is serial for now)

- 1 WAN (plan is cable modem connection for now, ethernet)

- at least 2 GIGA ethernet ports to the switched subnets in the building

Since this will serve a games cafe, the idea is to route the games through the lease line, and everything else through the cable (naive users browsing around, route port 80 etc to go out from cable)

I understand I ll need a router with 2 WICS and an onboard 4-port 1000 switch, but I cant seem to find this.

thanks for any suggestions.

K.C. Leblanc · 10 May 2008 at 12:16

I don't know much about Cisco, but one way to acheive this would be to use a internet proxy server configured with a the Cable router's ip as the default gateway and everything else configured for the Leased line.

oddjob62 · 10 May 2008 at 12:27

drak3 said:
I understand I ll need a router with 2 WICS and an onboard 4-port 1000 switch, but I cant seem to find this.

Why will you need 4 gig ports? You don't really need any, just a FastEthernet (10/100) to uplink to your main switch.

drak3 · 10 May 2008 at 12:33

oddjob62 said:
Why will you need 4 gig ports? You don't really need any, just a FastEthernet (10/100) to uplink to your main switch.

Bah, you are so right. I was thinking in terms of the local subnet which is giga switched and this mislead me.

The router needs be only 10/100. Total outgoing traffic in/out of WANS would be 30Mbps in the best case scenario.

Rich · 10 May 2008 at 14:43

You will be able to use route maps to send specific Port traffic out of different WAN interfaces. Thats with Cisco Routers by the way.
I would be having a look at the 1841 or 28xx series.

drak3 · 10 May 2008 at 14:50

Rich said:
You will be able to use route maps to send specific Port traffic out of different WAN interfaces. Thats with Cisco Routers by the way.
I would be having a look at the 1841 or 28xx series.

Thanks. The 1841 seems suitable. From what it says, it has 2 integrated 10/100 ports to connect my 2 switches (uplink) and I can install 2 interface cards. 1 cable WAN and 1 Serial.

I got it right?

Rich · 10 May 2008 at 16:44

Yup, that pretty much sums it up.

Then you need to read this:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_2/ip/configuration/guide/1cfindep.html

Look for the bit that says "Enabling Policy Routing (PBR)" and more specifically the bit "set interface". This allows you to define which interface traffic leaves.

So for example you would have an access-list which defines "interesting" traffic. By interesting, I mean interesting to the router. So the router sees traffic destined for port 27015 and realises it matches the access-list and forwards it out of the leased line connection. Anything else takes the default route out of the Cable.
It would probably make it far easier to configure it the other way round though, or you will spend a lot of time configuring new access-list entries for new games. I would probably configure the default route out of the Leased Line and use the route map to send Internet traffic/Mail/DNS the other way.

drak3 · 10 May 2008 at 17:51

Rich said:
Yup, that pretty much sums it up.

Then you need to read this:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_2/ip/configuration/guide/1cfindep.html

Look for the bit that says "Enabling Policy Routing (PBR)" and more specifically the bit "set interface". This allows you to define which interface traffic leaves.

So for example you would have an access-list which defines "interesting" traffic. By interesting, I mean interesting to the router. So the router sees traffic destined for port 27015 and realises it matches the access-list and forwards it out of the leased line connection. Anything else takes the default route out of the Cable.
It would probably make it far easier to configure it the other way round though, or you will spend a lot of time configuring new access-list entries for new games. I would probably configure the default route out of the Leased Line and use the route map to send Internet traffic/Mail/DNS the other way.

I agree, configuring the ports the naive user uses would be much simpler. Basically, the idea is to prevent daily users browsing youtube, google and talking on skype etc to lag spike the gamers. You understand!

bigredshark · 10 May 2008 at 19:39

drak3 said:
Thanks. The 1841 seems suitable. From what it says, it has 2 integrated 10/100 ports to connect my 2 switches (uplink) and I can install 2 interface cards. 1 cable WAN and 1 Serial.

I got it right?

Depends what interface you need for your cable, if it's just ethernet then the 1841 has 2 FE ports so you'll only need the serial WIC and daisy chain the switches off each other (so you'll get gigabit between switches).

Only thing to note is, I've found the 1841 can start to slow down if you run all the features on it (no surprise really, it's a cheap router and there are a lot of features). I'm talking about IDP, firewall, IPSEC tunnels, OSPF and VPN server here though, it seems fine with just the firewall enabled - I doubt it'll affect you but worth knowing.

drak3 · 11 May 2008 at 11:15

bigredshark said:
Depends what interface you need for your cable, if it's just ethernet then the 1841 has 2 FE ports so you'll only need the serial WIC and daisy chain the switches off each other (so you'll get gigabit between switches).

Only thing to note is, I've found the 1841 can start to slow down if you run all the features on it (no surprise really, it's a cheap router and there are a lot of features). I'm talking about IDP, firewall, IPSEC tunnels, OSPF and VPN server here though, it seems fine with just the firewall enabled - I doubt it'll affect you but worth knowing.

Thanks for yout info, appreciated.

This means I can use slot1 to server WI-FI if the cable will go on the onboard FE?

When you say "slow down" how many users it has to serve? For my application, it will be around 40 hosts dedicated plus another 40? hosts from laptops, when people connect etc.

bigredshark · 11 May 2008 at 16:51

drak3 said:
Thanks for yout info, appreciated.

This means I can use slot1 to server WI-FI if the cable will go on the onboard FE?

When you say "slow down" how many users it has to serve? For my application, it will be around 40 hosts dedicated plus another 40? hosts from laptops, when people connect etc.

Well I have one as a home router (I need it for work) and it started to slow down when I was doing IDP, firewall, VPN server and routing protocols all running together. The impact was an increase in latency as opposed to bad throughput.

The key here is I was running virtually every advanced service the box offered (completely unnecessary for you) and the processor isn't that quick in them so it's going to slow down. If you think you need to run many of those services, buy a 2800 of some description would be my advice.

My setup would be, a WIC for the serial connection, fe0/0 to your switches and fe0/1 to your cable connection. It's worth noting too that the 1841 will support the 4 port etherswitch HWIC if you need more FE ports (and it's fairly good value).

For the sort of number of users you're talking about, I'd say your connection is likely too slow by the way.