Fiber install at work

[StevieC]

The unit with the Blue Bar (white label with blue bar) is the Bell Fiber to Ethernet box (Whatever it's called), and then above that is a small Cisco box that is black.
I believe that is our new router that connects us to Chicago / Japan.

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted by StevieC

For AP's we are using Cisco Meraki is what it says on them.


The Meraki stuff is great gear. Very different from the traditional black/turquoise IOS-driven equipment and even their later lower cost Linux stuff. I don't know if you have any experience with it, but it's all cloud-managed and absolutely requires a subscription to function. But it is insanely easy to setup and manage.

 

[StevieC]

That would make sense because the IT guy I was chatting with showed me the control panel in a web browser for the AP. We moved one of them while he was here. I did the grunt work running the cables and because I had tools and they didn't having come via air, and he reconfigured it because it was in a different mode where it was. (Not sure what mode exactly). Anyway... He had all our other divisions in the list across North America and there were 100's of devices listed.

I kinda wanted to spend a week learning what was possible but I had scheduled customer visits and was only at the office for a few hours a day this week.

We have 6 AP's in our office because of how big the office space area is and we have fantastic coverage here and our warehouse area.

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted by StevieC
The unit with the Blue Bar (white label with blue bar) is the Bell Fiber to Ethernet box (Whatever it's called), and then above that is a small Cisco box that is black.
I believe that is our new router that connects us to Chicago / Japan.


Yeah, that's just a SAS (Service Access Switch). Rogers uses the Alcatel/Lucent ALU series, but it's the same thing in practice. You could do the same thing with any sort of Layer-3 managed switch.

The little black box is a Cisco ASA5506 firewall, not sure if yours is the X model or not, it can include what's basically a Raspberry Pi that runs a product that Cisco acquired several years back called "Firepower", in fact I think I made a thread about the 5506X-W I was running for a while at the house. It's their entry-level security appliance in the 2nd gen of the ASA series (probably 4th gen gear at least overall IIRC, because the PIX came before the ASA) and is a pretty capable piece of equipment; certainly more than capable of handling a small branch office, 50Mbit WAN service and several VPN's.

Are the 1921 ISR's still active? They are a popular site-to-site VPN choice for lower bandwidth applications, so it may be that the ASA is configured to push traffic to those links for VPN service, unless it is now handling that duty itself and those are legacy from the previous WAN config.

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted by StevieC
That would make sense because the IT guy I was chatting with showed me the control panel in a web browser for the AP. We moved one of them while he was here. I did the grunt work running the cables and because I had tools and they didn't having come via air, and he reconfigured it because it was in a different mode where it was. (Not sure what mode exactly). Anyway... He had all our other divisions in the list across North America and there were 100's of devices listed.

I kinda wanted to spend a week learning what was possible but I had scheduled customer visits and was only at the office for a few hours a day this week.

We have 6 AP's in our office because of how big the office space area is and we have fantastic coverage here and our warehouse area.


Yeah, I have a few dr's offices I manage with Meraki because of their remoteness and thus that gear was a far better fit than an IOS-driven ISR or an ASA. I've been really impressed with their firewall products too, which, while "basic" in terms of depth of configurability, are more than appropriate for most office installs.

What you saw was the Meraki Dashboard, and if you are a Service Provider, you can have multiple organizations under your profile that you can manage individually. Inside each Organization you have your Networks, which are your individual sites which can be anything from a full hospital to a teleworker with an IP handset on their desk at home. It's an extremely well thought-out system and makes insight and management a breeze.

 

[StevieC]

From what I understand they have it configured so that our internet traffic passes through the firewall and is dumped locally. All network traffic is routed to Chicago and then to Japan via VPN so that we have access to all the file servers in North America (with Chicago making the connections to other places in the US, Mexico and Brazil) and we have access to the ones in Japan via Chicago so that our applications work and file sharing works. It works quite well I might add. I've transferred files off our Chicago server since the upgrade and it's like it's next door just with the 50mps delay over what the transfer speed of gigabit Ethernet in this office would be locally.

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted by StevieC
From what I understand they have it configured so that our internet traffic passes through the firewall and is dumped locally. All network traffic is routed to Chicago and then to Japan via VPN so that we have access to all the file servers in North America (with Chicago making the connections to other places in the US, Mexico and Brazil) and we have access to the ones in Japan via Chicago so that our applications work and file sharing works. It works quite well I might add. I've transferred files off our Chicago server since the upgrade and it's like it's next door just with the 50mps delay over what the transfer speed of gigabit Ethernet in this office would be locally.


Yes, that sounds pretty typical. I was just curious as to how the 1921's played into it, as they could be VPN endpoints to which the handoff is managed by the ASA, or they could be legacy from the previous install...etc.

 

[StevieC]

We used to be routed to directly to Japan maybe left over from that. ???

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted by StevieC
We used to be routed to directly to Japan maybe left over from that. ???


could very well be.