Spec me an high spec network, please! :P

Muel

Muel

Muel

Soldato
Joined
26 Jun 2009
Posts
3,023
Location
Sheffield
Help me spec a network, please! :P

Hey, I'm wanting to upgrade my entire network, everything I has is old, cheap and useless and I've had enough of messing around trying to get it to work.

I'm not very up on new technologies, but this is a list of what I'd like it to do ideally.

  • Handle connections between 4 computers
  • Have scope for a dedicted NAS to be built in the future. (Lots of very large file transfers, anything up to 250gb at a time).
  • Have a print server, although our printer needs changing anyway, so would a printer with a built in server or a dedicated print server be better?
  • Stream Freeview over the network? No idea if this is possible, it would just be cool to be able to watch freeview on all the computers.
  • Be fairly secure, I've had Sonicwall stuff before and would ideally like something to that level, but as long as it's fairly secure it'll be fine. I've got nothing worth hacking in to steal, apart from my credit card details when i buy online, which is insured anyway.

First port of call is a router or something similar. I want to start off well and go for 1gbps Ethernet. Are there any clear favourites here?

Cheers for any advice in advance guys!
 
Last edited:
End of the day if you want decent gear you still need a seperate router and switch, get a decent router/firewall and a decent gigabit switch. For home use the switch is easy, you can't really need anything more advanced than a HP 1800 series unit - 8 or 24 port depending how many device you see yourself having.

router/firewall wise, depends what you want, I have a modular Juniper SSG20 with ADSL PIM which is fantastic but it's probably beyond your budget as it's genuine enterprise level gear. A Cisco 800 series box would likely serve you well but it's a learning curve if you've never worked with Cisco before.

And probably a decent wireless access point - I like the Apple airport extreme as being better than the usual home targeted gear but cheaper than the really professional level kit.

That little lot won't give you a whole lot of change from £400 though, so it depends if you really meant 'high spec'

You also didn't mention what kind of internet connection you've got, if you've got cable then at least you don't need an ADSL modem in your router so a simply low end Cisco ASA, Juniper SSG or (if you really must) Sonicwall firewall are possible instead of a router...
 
assuming you are on cable then as for your router i'd go for either the D-Link DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo or the Netgear WNDR3700

the two highest spec wirelss routers available, both with 4xGigabit LAN ports and Dual Band wireless N.

instead of dedicated NAS, what i did was build a low end PC to use as a server, much more flexible, i put 3x1.5Tb drives in RAID5 for some redundancy and fast read speeds.

the benefit of doing this is obviously that you can plug in your printer and share it accross the network. both the D-Link and the Netgear routers have a USB port on the back, netgear only supports USB Flash drives and External hard drives whereas the D-Link will support a USB printer aswell.

streaming freeview is definately possible. are you looking to let everyone watch different channels at the same time? a firend of mine did this by building a PC with lots of TV tuner cards and installing mediaportal or something similar, this allowed everyone to stream the tv over the network. obviously this can be done on a smaller scale to allow everyone to watch the same channel at once.

as for your firewall stuff, im not sure, routers have built in firewalls and windows firewall isnt too bad so i think you are pretty secure!

it is possible to build and atom based wireless router with wireless n and gigabit which you can obviously install something like ClarkConnect or smoothwall
 
bigredshark said:
End of the day if you want decent gear you still need a seperate router and switch, get a decent router/firewall and a decent gigabit switch. For home use the switch is easy, you can't really need anything more advanced than a HP 1800 series unit - 8 or 24 port depending how many device you see yourself having.

router/firewall wise, depends what you want, I have a modular Juniper SSG20 with ADSL PIM which is fantastic but it's probably beyond your budget as it's genuine enterprise level gear. A Cisco 800 series box would likely serve you well but it's a learning curve if you've never worked with Cisco before.

And probably a decent wireless access point - I like the Apple airport extreme as being better than the usual home targeted gear but cheaper than the really professional level kit.

That little lot won't give you a whole lot of change from £400 though, so it depends if you really meant 'high spec'

You also didn't mention what kind of internet connection you've got, if you've got cable then at least you don't need an ADSL modem in your router so a simply low end Cisco ASA, Juniper SSG or (if you really must) Sonicwall firewall are possible instead of a router...
Click to expand...

I was thinking of latest technologies when I said high spec, sorry now I look it wasn't obvious at all. The stuff you suggested sounds great but it's a bit too expensive for me. :P

apilbeam said:
assuming you are on cable then as for your router i'd go for either the D-Link DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo or the Netgear WNDR3700

the two highest spec wirelss routers available, both with 4xGigabit LAN ports and Dual Band wireless N.

instead of dedicated NAS, what i did was build a low end PC to use as a server, much more flexible, i put 3x1.5Tb drives in RAID5 for some redundancy and fast read speeds.

the benefit of doing this is obviously that you can plug in your printer and share it accross the network. both the D-Link and the Netgear routers have a USB port on the back, netgear only supports USB Flash drives and External hard drives whereas the D-Link will support a USB printer aswell.

streaming freeview is definately possible. are you looking to let everyone watch different channels at the same time? a firend of mine did this by building a PC with lots of TV tuner cards and installing mediaportal or something similar, this allowed everyone to stream the tv over the network. obviously this can be done on a smaller scale to allow everyone to watch the same channel at once.

as for your firewall stuff, im not sure, routers have built in firewalls and windows firewall isnt too bad so i think you are pretty secure!

it is possible to build and atom based wireless router with wireless n and gigabit which you can obviously install something like ClarkConnect or smoothwall
Click to expand...

I'm on ADSL, and not looking to change really as I'm happy with the connection I'm getting and it's very stable, and I don't have any download limits and the fair usage policy has never been thrown up, so I want to stick with it.

I shall definately considor building a server instead of a NAS now. Aa of the Freeview option, I only really need one computer at a time to be watching/recording it, so if I were to add one card into my server, it sounds like that will solve that!



What I'm really looking for is a normal home router, something netgearish or something like that, but with gigabyte ethernet, wireless N and ADSL2+, and it needs to be fairly powerful but not insanely so, as long as 3 computers can use the internet and access the freecom lan drive I have now, and I can be running one large transfer to the hard drive at the same time then all will be well. The streaming thing would be great, but it's not super important, I usually watch the iPlayer instead of the telly anyway because I prefer everything on demand. :P

In the future it'll need to handle a print server of sorts, which won't really be a problem I'd imagine for any router.

It would be great to upgrade to a server setup over the freecom drive at some point.

I've just realised then, it will need at least 6 LAN ports, are there any home routers that come with 6 or more ports? Most I've seen just come with 4?
 
I think I've found the routers to choose from, either the Netgear WNR3500, or the WNDR3700.

Anyone have any advice or praise/scare stories on them? :D

Thanks for the advice on switches guys, I'll probably get one as and when I need it. At the moment I can make do with 4 ports, but I'll need 6 in the future for the added NAS/Server and print server. (Although if I build a server, they could be integrated right?)
 
I haven't got a lot of time for netgear devices at all, but I can't speak from recent experience with these and I couldn't really tell you what a good consumer router is these days. I would say linksys but they don't seem to make a ADSL router with gigabit that I can see...
 
Don't bother with expensive router's or switches, the cheap ones work just as well for your needs.
Put the money towards building a decent PC based NAS, I've got one running 8 disk hardware RAID5 on Windows Server 2003, and get over 100MB/s sustained transfers to and from my Windows machines over gigabit - this is over a cheap £20 8 port gigabit switch.

If you want better performance than that you're really going to need deep pockets to get managed switches and Teaming capable NIC's, or 10Gb hardware.
 
Will they be powerful enough to deal with having 3 computers, a Lan drive, a NAS, and a print server all working at once?

Bearing in mind I do 150gb+ file transfers on a regular basis? 100mb/s transfer speeds with a gigabyte switch seems pretty rubbish to me? No offence, but I assumed that you should be getting 1gb/s speeds?
 
Whats been suggested above is pretty much what I have setup in my home.

Up in my office there is a small comms box housing the Virgin modem, Linksys Router, 1U HP 1800 series 24x port Gig switch and file server.

File server cost me ~£500 to build, consists of a Q6600 G0 (probably overkill but got it in case I wanted to run VMware), 4GB RAM, 160GB OS drive and 6x 1.5TB drives in 3ware hardware RAID.

The RAID setup is fantastic, throughput is in excess of 300MB/s meaning the limiting factor in my setup, is always the single HDD in any of the other computers (80-90MB/s).
 
Muel said:
Bearing in mind I do 150gb+ file transfers on a regular basis? 100mb/s transfer speeds with a gigabyte switch seems pretty rubbish to me? No offence, but I assumed that you should be getting 1gb/s speeds?
Click to expand...

Remember that's 100MegaBytes/second, which is 1Gb network speeds and that's pretty damn impressive. Most of the time you'll be lucky if you get 70-80MB/s on a gig network (obviously it depends on used equipment).

Second the HP 1400 G switches though, can't fault them, brilliant bits of gear for the price.
 
Muel said:
Will they be powerful enough to deal with having 3 computers, a Lan drive, a NAS, and a print server all working at once?
Click to expand...
Yes, even the cheap switches have plenty of backplane bandwidth. Bear in mind that speeds from your NAS will drop considerably when you have multiple operations going on, due to limitations with mechanical rotating drives.
i.e. two computers trying to read different files from the NAS at the same time will each see much less than half the normal throughput.
You'd need SSD's to get around that, which would very quickly increase the costs, easier just to schedule your 150GB transfers so they don't overlap.
Bearing in mind I do 150gb+ file transfers on a regular basis? 100mb/s transfer speeds with a gigabyte switch seems pretty rubbish to me? No offence, but I assumed that you should be getting 1gb/s speeds?
Click to expand...
150GB would take 25minutes to move at 100MB/s (MegaBytes/s). a 1 Gb (GigaBit / s) connection is theoretically capable of 125MB/s transfers, but packet overhead etc mean that around 100MB/s is the best you can reasonably expect.
 
Sorry to jump in the thread Muel but have a few relevant questions myself.

Can you get a wireless module for that HP switch? What hardware firewall (has to have Gb ethernet, single port is fine) would people recommend if I were to get rid of my current router (which I do want to do)?

Is it better then the Netgear GS105 5-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch? If so, why (reason I ask is the netgear is cheaper (can get a refurbished GS105 for £25) and I don't really need 8 gigabit ports)?

What wireless [module] would people recommend (doesn't need to be top of the range, just reliable/easy to configure)?

Just a quick scoot around shows me I can get a Netgear ProSafe 8 Port VPN Firewall, with the GS105 for £50 in total, obviously that doesn't have wireless though.
 
Last edited:
Forget gigabit on the firewall, you're compromising what you can find and you'll never actually be moving gigabit traffic through it (put it this way, £1500 enterprise firewalls can't do wirespeed gigabit, £100 home office ones have no chance). I religiously recommend Juniper or (if you must) Cisco firewalls, anything cheaper you may as well just use the one in a standard ADSL router...it'll be as good (that is to say, rubbish).

Wireless, as said already, I like the apple airport extreme, it works flawlessly with decent speeds and supports a few higher end features which are nice (guest networks, SNMP access and syslog being the bits I use).

Just to say, if you're not spending serious money, I'd be careful spending too much at all. Unless you're getting something like Juniper/Cisco firewalls, high end wireless etc then the benefit you'll see over a basic £70 router with built in wireless and the HP 1400G switch for your wired clients is minimal. Basically either get a decent but standard wireless router and a decent gigabit switch for £120 or so all in or spend £400-500 on high end stuff, the middle ground between those two doesn't offer any gain for the extra cash.

And from what you're saying, you don't really need the high end stuff...not many home users come anywhere close to needing it...
 
Thanks for that bigred, after looking around I'd discounted a GB firewall anyway. No I don't need the top end stuff, but I can get Cisco/Juniper kit for a decent price. And it would be nice to play around with to learn a few things. What kind of Juniper switches would you recommend?

I guess I might as well just stick to my Netgear WNR2000 for wireless access (as I have it, so not an added expense). I've had a few problems with it to be honest, and I fancied replacing it but I guess there's no need. The wireless isn't the biggest issue anyway.

Could you tell me why the HP 1400G is better then, say, the Netgear GS608? I'm not massively clued up on the differences between the vendors.
 
platypus said:
Thanks for that bigred, after looking around I'd discounted a GB firewall anyway. No I don't need the top end stuff, but I can get Cisco/Juniper kit for a decent price. And it would be nice to play around with to learn a few things. What kind of Juniper switches would you recommend?

I guess I might as well just stick to my Netgear WNR2000 for wireless access (as I have it, so not an added expense). I've had a few problems with it to be honest, and I fancied replacing it but I guess there's no need. The wireless isn't the biggest issue anyway.

Could you tell me why the HP 1400G is better then, say, the Netgear GS608? I'm not massively clued up on the differences between the vendors.
Click to expand...

Juniper have problems with switches right now, they don't really make any which cost under £1500 at the moment. Good gear but not even an option for small offices at the moment. Even low end Cisco switches cost a lot too though.

Which leaves the HP for a few reasons, HP are about the only serious networking supplier who make a Gigabit switch in that price range (3com being the other, though HP have just bought them). The kit is good quality, comes with a great warranty and I trust it.

Comparably any network engineer worth their pay check would laugh at you if you suggested using a Netgear (or dlink etc) in a datacenter or enterprise environment. Some of their products might be all right but the perception is it's toy network equipment, not to be taken seriously or used for serious things.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom