Saturday, August 2, 2008

Stressful week.

After work Friday, I just came home and took a nap.  I did not go to the gym.  I did not go to happy hour with my coworkers.  I went face down on the couch.  It's been that kind of week.  After much work, I finally got all the pieces I needed for the office network I'm setting up. . . except the antennas for the wireless access point.  I can probably grab some dipole antennas from anywhere.  The router I set up for this office is doing everything.  It is the DHCP server, the switch with four VLANs, the voice mail server with 100 hours of voice mail capacity, the phone system, the Internet egress/ingress, the firewall, the time of day server, the VPN tunnel end point, the wireless controller, and it supplies power to the access point and the phones.  I've never configured more protocols on one box.  It has one Internet connection which carries the phone trunks (SIP/RTP from an ITSP called nexVortex), the VPN connectivity to two different companies, and Internet access.  After this, I can setup a branch office network anywhere for under $10k for network and phone equipment and about that for labor, including the cabling.  I have the skillz.  And the monthly recurring cost for all the circuits, including 10 megabits of internet and 8 DID numbers with unlimited concurrent calls and 10,000 minutes per month, is under $300.  If not for executives asking for lower costs and more features, I would never have put together such a monstrosity, but now that I've seen it work, I want to duplicate it. 

When I try to list the protocols working in that beast, it amazes me the amount of technology employed and also reminds me how much I've learned over the years of doing this stuff.

Ethernet IEEE 802.3
FastEthernet IEEE 802.3u
VLAN trunking, IEEE 802.1q and 802.10
PoE 802.3af
ARP RFC826
IPv4 RFC791, RFC1812
IP over Ethernet RFC894 (aka 802.16)
TCP RFC793
BGP RFC4271
3DES MD5-HMAC RFC2104
IPSec RFC2401
NAT RFC1631
UDP RFC768
STUN RFC3489
SIP RFC3261
RTP RFC3550
CDP
SCCP (aka Skinny)
DHCP RFC2131
NTP RFC1305
ITU-T G.711 ulaw
ITU-T H.323
SNMP RFC1157
TFTP RFC1350
DSCP RFC2474
IEEE STP 802.1d
. . . and the list could go on and on.  I haven't even started on the wireless 802.11 protocols, encryption, and authentication.  This is the tip of the iceberg of protocols Iknow, these just happen to be the ones I'm using for this implementation.  If I added a Cisco PAG and a Synology 207+ for VMSS, it would do the physical security and camera surveillance, too.  There's a whole suite of protocols related to video.

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