Managed office setup

shatpank81

shatpank81

shatpank81

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Joined
25 Oct 2013
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1,404
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Tipton
Hi
Been asked as a favour, because i do some networking but done nothing on this scale
Ok the building as 35 rooms, which all have been flood cabled (about 12 network points per room) and all the cables from each have been pulled to a central room in the building, which i have injected into patch cables and i know which room and cable is which... So thats that done

However, each room needs to be on a separate subnet e.g.
192.168.1.X
192.168.2.X
192.168.3.X
And so on......

The building is having a leaseline installed, think they are looking at 20mb/20mb leaseline
The issue i have now is what equipment do i get to do this?
I know from using draytek routers, i can put 4 separate lan subnets each with dhcp on each one
So that means i would need 9 drayteks etc
Then add a switch to each lan port on each draytek for each of the offices/rooms

But that is just me looking at it quickly, i have told my mate this wont be cheap, but each office he rents out at £500 a month so he knows initially it will cost a bit and the room where all the equipment will be housed on my say so as got some decent sized floor cabinets

Just looking at some help/advice on any other equipment i could use to do this?
The key is that no other office can see each others network, but each office as dhcp, so they can just walk into office and plug a laptop etc in without having to preconfigure the devices

But i have zero cisco experience, so that rules this type of equipment out

Sorry for waffling
 
Don't use 9 DrayTek routers, use a proper UTM from Cisco/Sonicwall/Sophos/Fortigate etc.

And you're probably going to need more than 20Mbit for 35 offices. Let's say each office only has 3 people in, that's over 100 users straight away.

Put in a Mac mini running Server.app and turn on Caching so that App Store and iOS updates come from the server instead of the internet connection (assuming there will be enough Mac and iOS users in the offices to make it worth doing).

What are you doing for Wi-Fi? Don't leave it to each tenant to bring their own access point, it only takes one idiot to decide that they absolutely have to have a custom firmware with huge antennas and boosting the Tx power to a stupid level to cause problems for everyone else.
 
I only said drayteks etc because i have used them and i know how they work.
Whereas cisco etc i have knowledge of that

I did mention about the 20mbit to him, but said at the moment he only has 6 rooms let, because he is renovating the other offices, he doesnt think increasing the leaseline yet at the additional cost is worth it, until he gets more tenants.
But wants the network infrastructure setup first..

What would the mac mini be used for?
I would be sorting the wifi later on as well, once i have the internal network all configured
 
You'll also need to consider things like public IP addresses. Will the leased line provider give you enough to present each tenant on an individual public IP? The risk of having all offices going from a single IP is that when one tenant gets the IP on a RBL due to a virus, other tenants may find they can't send emails. Or somebody was running BitTorrent at home and brings in their laptop without closing it.

Also QoS or managing the bandwidth - can any single user max out the line? If somebody wants to use VoIP but another person is chewing through downloads...

IT in managed office is a PITA IMHO. I've seen it from a customer perspective at places like Regus where everything has a huge charge attached and from the IT provider where somebody expects you to turn out on site immediately when their iPhone won't connect to the WiFi.
 
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