Small Office Switch Questions

Hi Guys,
Have a small office I need to setup with a few requirements.
I need to replace some unmanaged switches with one or two managed devices to better facilitate bandwith and general managment. There will be 5/6 VLANS (VOIP, Users, Wifi, CCTV ect), between 24 and 48 workstations requiring gigabit speeds and around 15 VOIP phones and 5 IP Cameras.
Due to costs, i'm quite happy to go with a 24port 1000base switch and a 48port 10/100base POE switch (as I can bounce lots of devices that don't need 1000 like printers and accesspoints down to the POE switch). I was looking originally at the 3750 series (1000 and 100 and using the stacking ports) but the cost may be a little high.
Used switches are not a real problem (unless anyone can advise on some really good reasons why) so picking up old cat hardware and getting the latest images are a option. Ideally, I want to spend under 1500 USD on something like this, but if it could be sub $1000 that would be great. In terms of the POE device, it needs to be standard POE not Cisco Pre-Standard.
Happy to keep in the same series even if it's older.
I've seen the small business series, but it seems that by the time you spend the money on two switches, you're nearly upto the prices of two used cats.
Any thoughts on those?
Thanks.

I was looking originally at the 3750 series (1000 and 100 and using the stacking ports) but the cost may be a little high.
You will no longer be able to purchase FastEthernet 3750 as Cisco has announced the End-of-Sale of the 10/100BaseTx of the 3560 and 3750 since January 2011. Cisco has also announced the End-of-Sale of the 3560G/E and 3750G/E back in March 2012.
So this leaves you with the 3560X and the 3750X and I can assure you this variety doesn't come cheap at all.
This leaves you with the last remaining stack-capable model, the 2960S. Like what Paul has said, the 2960S is a "triple speed" variety: 10/100/1000BaseTx. You can have uplinks of 1 Gbps fibre or 10 Gbps fibre. You can have "half" PoE or Full PoE.
But what sets the 2960S different from the 3750X (in terms of stacking) is the amount of switches in a stack. The 3750X can support up to nine but the 2960S can support up to four. This factor was set deliberately to prevent potential users to choose the cheaper 2960S instead of the 3750X.

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Small office network questions

I have a small office with 4-5 mac computers. I have a Mac mini set up as a file server and I use a standard cable connection for my internet service. I use a wired router (ethernet cables) all going to a netgear switch.
Just bought a mac mini and a drobo storage device. I have successfully set up the drobo on the mac mini and I can "see" the files and read & write to the external drive. I also have a few other people in the office -- which will need access to the drobo via the network, but have a few questions there:
1. I don't see the name of the other computers that can connect to the unit. When I get on one of the other machines and look for the drobo I can find it & edit files but from the mac-mini side, I can't see the proper name of the other computer. How do I do this?
2. Can I limit which folders are accessible within the drobo that attached to the mac mini
3. Am I missing anything from a safety standpoint? Can Anyone come into my office and access the files that are on the mac/mini drobo? Worse off, is the mac mini vulnerable to the outside world with this setup?
Thanks for the help, new to all this networking stuff.

It's been a week, so i don't know if you have already worked this out, but...
while I am not familiar with your router, when I have used linksys before, i find it better to use static IP addresses for everything. Try setting static IP addresses and make sure everyone's mask is 255.255.255.0. Some routers also have a flag to allow computers to see each other.
Best of luck.

Small Office AEBS Not Re-Connecting

My apologies if this question has already been addressed.
I have hooked up an AEBS in a small office. It seems to work well, but takes a long time reconnecting wireless computers. It is sometimes (almost always) necessary to restart the AEBS.
The WAN port of the AEBS is connected to a T1 router from the ISP. A LAN port is connected to the uplink of a Linksys switch. There is a mixture of Macs and XP. All the Macs are wireless, including 2 Mac Mini's, a Macbook, a Macbook Pro, and a Powerbook G4 (mine).
Again, everything works very well once I do a restart of the AEBS, but I do not understand why there is so much trouble reconnecting the wireless machines without a restart.
Any help would be appreciated.
David

For anyone interested, the problem lay in the ISP's T1 router. They were broadcasting addresses conflicting with the AEBS. Once I changed the AEBS DHCP range from 192.168.1.x. to 10.0.1.x, everything started working fine.
BTW- since I answered my own question, do I still get points? 8-)

1 small office + 2 companies + shared resources = ? (SG300, SA520, WAP2000)

I need to configure a network in 1 small office space that segregates 2 company domains but allows them to share an Internet connection, a WAP, a couple of printers, and a non-Cisco VoIP phone system. And, it needs to provide guest access to the internet and printers via wireless. I have a SG300-28P, an SA520W, and a WAP2000 to make it all happen. Here's the plan below. Will this work? Is there a better approach that uses the available equipment? Thanks in advance!!!
VLANs:
VLAN 1 - default, mgmt vlan, 192.168.1.0
VLAN 10 - CompanyA-Data, 192.168.10.0
VLAN 20 - CompanyB-Data, 192.168.20.0
VLAN 30 - Guest, 192.168.30.0
VLAN 50 - Printers, 192.168.50.0
VLAN 100 - Internet, 192.168.100.0
VLAN 200 - Voice, 192.168.200.0
Device IPs:
SG300 = 192.168.1.254
SA520 = 192.168.1.1
WAP2000 = 192.168.1.245
DHCP Servers:
VLAN 10 = SBS-A
VLAN 20 = SBS-B
VLANs 30,50,200 = SA520
VLAN 1,200 = NO DHCP
Wireless:
SA520 is primary, WAP2000 is repeater (will it repeat multiple SSIDs???)
SSIDA - VLAN10
SSIDB - VLAN20
SSID-Guest - VLAN30
Switch Ports:
SG300:
1 = trunk, VLAN 1
2-6, 25 = access, VLAN 10
7-12, 26 = access, VLAN 20
13 = access, VLAN 30 (unmanaged switch providing additional ports)
14 = access, VLAN 50 (unmanaged switch providing additional ports)
15-23 = access, VLAN 200
24 = trunk, VLANs 10, 20, 30 (connect to WAP2000)
27 = unallocated
28 = trunk, all VLANs (connect to SA520 p4)
SA520:
1-3 = access VLAN 1
4 = trunk all VLANs (connect to SG300 p28)
Routing:
SG300 in L2 mode using SA520 as router on a stick??

Hi Rick,
This is a great question that our Partner Design Support team can help you with. Please go here to start chatting with them:
https://supportforums.cisco.com/community/netpro/small-business/partnerzone/pds
Refer the engineer to this post so that they can see what you have.
Regards,
Cindy Toy
Cisco Small Business Community Manager
for Cisco Small Business Products
www.cisco.com/go/smallbizsupport
twitter: CiscoSBsupport

Setting up a small office network - advice needed

We are to move our small office (3 people) from a shared office environment to our own office space. That has the huge advantage that we´ll finally be Mac-only, but the agreeable disadvantage that there is no longer a networking professional around. And this is where I enter. I now have to find a solution on how to set up the network, and I do not have experience in that field (though I am fairly experienced with OSX).
As of today we have a G5 iMac, a G4 powermac and a G4 iBook. In the not too far future we will be getting a proper G5 powermac as well.
The G4 is used for low key office applications, Word and Mail mostly. The iMac is the workhorse that runs all graphic/video applications. It also is used for presentations once in a while, so that this machine is not always available. The iBook is used for writing and e-mail plus some light-weight field editing.
I would like to find a solution that we could store all important files on one computer, so that it would be easier to make regular back-ups. And everyone could easily access those files.
It would be great if data from iCal and Adress Book could also be stored centrally, such as that addresses are available for everyone, and updated calenders are available for all employees.
As the budget should be as small as possible, I was wondering if we could use the G4 powerbook (867mhz, 1gig memory) to run a sharing service in the background. Then I could also install a second harddisk and use both hdd as a backing-up-raid. Once in a while I would make a backup on a external firewire disk.
Is this a possible solution, or should we rather have one machine dedicated as a server. Would it be sufficient then to use the G4 as that server and buy a MacMini or iMac as the office machine?
Since it is a small network, would I still need an OSX server license, or is the standard OSX enough for this?
iMac G5 20, G4 QS 867mhz, iBook G4, PB 190, and a Pentium that I haven't switched on in months... Mac OS X (10.4.3) Experienced with technology, just not with networking...

There are two ways to set up a network:
1 peer-to-peer
2 client-server
Peer-to-peer is cheaper, but not reliable. Apple supports peer-to-peer in OS X. (In fact, in all versions of the Mac OS since System 7.) You can have up to 10 users connected to any one machine using peer-to-peer. (Warning... if you have more than five users, that machine is going to get slow.) The various peers are used as normal workstations while sharing. You have three peers, and may get one or two more, so you can use peer-to-peer. Just don't overdo it. Your planed usage of a few Word docs and a few graphics files sounds about right.
Under OS X the peers are limited to sharing specific folders only, unless they use 3rd-party software such as SharePoint, which allows the sharing of any and all folders.
It seems that you plan to use the G4 as a 'server' using peer-to-peer. You also seem to be planing to add additional drives, and RAID. I'd get a high end IDE PCI card, or a FireWire card, or a SCSI card, for the G4. Depending on which G4 you have, you can stick up to four hard drives in the case if you go IDE or internal FireWire or SCSI. External SCSI or FireWire drive configuratins are limited only by the drive slots available (7 for low-end SCSI, 15 for high-end SCSI, 63 for FireWIre) and the space available. (And, of course, the budget availanle...) You can get dedicated RAID controllers.
For backup I'd get DVD or tape. Tape holds more and is easier to use, but is expensive (you have no idea how expensive, but I suspect you'll find out) and can be finicky. DVD is a lot cheaper, but it's slow, and someone will have to sit and feed discs into the machine. This will get old really fast. If your backup requirements are modest, DVDs might do, but probably you'll need something else. You could just buy an external hard disk and back up to that...
Apple charges US$500 for OS X Server 10 seat version. (They charge $1000 for the 255-seat version.) OS X Server should run on the G4, and will turn it into a full-fledged server.
Any of the O'Reilly books on OS X Server and/or on Samba should help you get started. O'Reilly's _Using Samba_ has a section devoted specifically to SMB on OS X Server which should be quite helpful.

Randomly monitor small office network

Looking for a user-friendly, dummy-proof article on creating a small office network from a total of four Mac's (3 iMacs, one Air), allowing the administrator to randomly monitor without detection the real-time activities taking place on the other two machines. Triple points for iOS monitoring capabilities, as well

Hello, rjbm_exact.
You definitely need a managed switch and a Cisco Small Business (200 or 300 series) can meet your requirements. You can setup separate VLAN to segregate user access level. Are you also looking at expanding your wireless (guest access)?
Let me know if you need more assistance or e-mail ([email protected]) me directly. Kind regards.

Small Office Network Setup Help

Hi folks,
We are renting a small office in a floor which consists of many offices. The way internet is distributed here is, they have a verizon fios router and a couple of unmanaged switch, from which cables are run to offices for internet. One of the port on a switch is dedicated to our office.
In our office we have 6 computers and a network printer. The computers need to share files with each other and be able to print.
We want to isolate our office network from others. When we use an unmanaged switch, the version router dhcp assigns ip addresses to computers and we are able to access the internet. The verizon local ip is: 192.168.1.xxx. But we can also see computers that are of other offices, which means they can see us.
How do we create a separate network? Say we want to use IP 192.168.10.XXX or 10.0.0.xxx. We just bought a 24 port managed (L2) switch.
Thanks

Hello, rjbm_exact.
You definitely need a managed switch and a Cisco Small Business (200 or 300 series) can meet your requirements. You can setup separate VLAN to segregate user access level. Are you also looking at expanding your wireless (guest access)?
Let me know if you need more assistance or e-mail ([email protected]) me directly. Kind regards.

Small office VoIP system

Good morning everyone,
I am currently defining the architecture for a very simple VoIP network that is to be installed in a small office (about 70 VoIP extensions). Initially, we don't want to include any special feature, just the internal voice IP service and the ability to make up to 4 simultaneous external phone calls through PSTN.
We are going to acquire a Cisco 2921 Router, the SL-29-UC-K9 Unified Communications licence and a VIC2-4FXO.
I have been reading about ISR G2 licensing, but I am still not sure of fully understanding what we need for this project. My question is, does the UC licence for the Cisco 2921 include the FL-CME licence to use the Call Manager Express functionality? do we need something else? any special license for the FXOs functionality?
Thank you for your help
Pablo

Thank you guys for your answers,
Actually, it's my first contact as a developer with VoIP and UC Cisco technology... so I would like to keep it simple at the beginning: just internal voip phone calls and the possibility to ring pstn extensions. Our budget is very limited too... so I need to stick to the hardware that I told you in the previous message: 2921 + fxo card.
As far as I have read, SRST functionality is very useful when you have several nodes, to provide survival to each local node that loses connectivity with a centralized call manager. But in our scenario, with a single node... I think we can give up this functionality.
So, we only have budget to purchase any other license that could be necessary to accomplish this small project. so the key question is: does SL-29-UC-K9 Unified Communications License include Call Manager Express functionality and the ability to use de FXO card to make pstn phone calls as well? because that will be more than enough for us...
thank you very much
Pablo

Setup Lion Server for use in Small Office of Windows & Mac Clients

I've purchased a Mac Mini Server with Lion Server installed to be used in my small office of less than 10 people.
The primary goal of this server is to used for File Sharing, bother locally, and remotely.
In the process of setting up Lion Server I have come across a couple things that I am confused about.
The first is Open Directory.
It is my understanding that this is not a necessary setup for the number of users in my office, however I set it up anyway as it appeared to be something that would be useful in the future.
I have come across information that states Lion Server will not be accessible for Windows users connected via Open Directory. Thus my inclination is to disable the service, and set up my users as local users.
My question is, for local and remote File Sharing, is there any benefit to using Open Directory?
The second has to do with Remote Access.
I am familiar with the notion of a VPN, but I need some clarification as to my remote access options.
When I go to setup my Server's hostname, I am presented with three options. 1) Host name for local network, 2) Host name for private network, and 3) Host name for Internet.
I have a domain name for my company's website, so I set up a subdomain (server.mycompany.com), asked my ISP for a Static WAN IP, and pointed thesubdomain to said IP using my DNS. Thus this appears to be option number 3; to allow users to connect to my server from the local network, as well as the Internet.
My question is, how does this differ from a VPN both in setup, as well as method with which users will access the server? Is there a benefit to one over the other? I would Google this to find an answer, but I can't seem to find a name for what this setup is called.
I very much appreciate any help you can provide.
Thanks.

Well, I spoke too soon. Lion Server is unstable, awkward and is far too limited to qualify as an Apple product. Even though there's quite a few enhancements, the omissions of technologies in the server 10.6 edition makes this "server" a no go for us.
Even after installing mysql, I still cannot run a Joomla website on Lion server as it should be done. The wiki's a nice thing to have, but isn't a "professional grade" solution. There's too much iOS as well.
With that said, I think it's a shame that apple would put customers through so much frustration and disappointment by releasing such a lame product. In order for us to use Lion server, we would have to be able to run a second (totally separate) instance of Apache. It also appears that server settings are changing to the extent that services become inaccessible as the system is running.

Small DC Switch Design

Hello,
I'm working on options for a small DC switch design. This DC has 5
virtual hosts with 10-20 guest vm's each. Each server has two quad
port gig nics with 6 of the 8 gig ports connected (3 for iSCSI and 3
for data or management. It also has two 3 node sans each with 2 gig
ports per node, a host of other small servers including voice servers,
management servers, asa firewall, and a few routers. Total of 50-60
ports as of right now.
Connected to the DC is 7 other buildings each with there own 1 gig
fiber connection serving about 3000 devices in total including
desktops, laptops, ip phones, wireless ap's, building automation,
alarm panels, etc....
Right now in each of the 7 buildings has a 3560G as an aggregation
switch connected back to the DC. The DC also has a few 3560G's and
3750G's for the sans and servers. The system seems to work ok for the
most part aside from micro bursts overwhelming the buffers on these
switches and the etherchannel trunks between them dropping a minor
amount of packets. QOS is configured for the voice network and there
are little to no complaints.
What I would like to know (costs being the biggest factor) is what
would be a better switch design for the current and future traffic in
this network. Some options I was thinking about are as follows:
I would needs at least 96 ports.
So option A is to go with a 4506-E bundle with 2 48 port line cards,
sup 6l-e and a WS-X4712-SFP+E or something of the sorts.   And then
upgrade to the enterprise services license and do all of the routing
and switching for the DC on this one switch. Means little redundancy
and no failover.
Option B was to go with the same 4506-E bundle, without the extra
license and without the SFP line card and put in some sort of layer
three aggregation switch, possibly an me3600x.
Option C Is to go with the 4503-E, the SFP line card and the IP
Enterprise services license. And two top of rack switches, either
2360's or 4948's.
I would like to do some PBR on the aggregation switch, but I am unsure if the me3600x is capable of doing that.
I have no experience in this matter so any other thoughts or
suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Dan.

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If cost is the biggest factor, and the only notable issue now is occasional packet drops due to insufficient buffers, perhaps some buffer tuning would be something to consider.
A really important question to answer is how important redundancy. At lower port densities (3 to 4 stack members), the switch stack is less expensive than a chassis that supports redundancy. At very low port densities (2 to 3 stack members) the stack might be less expensive than even a non-redundant chassis.
BTW, the 3750-E/X offers much more performance than the original 3750 series. If offers wire-speed PPS and fabric per switch, twice the ring bandwidth and uses the ring, for unicast, much "smarter".
Perhaps a dual WS-C3750X-12S or WS-C3750X-24S for your core with dual MEC fiber etherchannl links to your aggregation switches? In the DC itself, you might also use 2960s to provide DC edge ports. For growth, a dual 3750-X stack would support four 10 gig ports which could be used with 10 gig servers or 10 gig SAN or as a 10gig link to other DC switches, such as the 2960S (which support their own stacking technology).

VoIP for Small Office

Hi all-
I am new to VoIP technology and currently working on a study for the business on deploying VoIP. Our business is small and currently is connected to the interent via DSL. We do have some Cisco routers and would like to know what is involved in deploying VoIP for our small office!
Thanks in advnace,
sK

You need a router in the branch. As small as an 857 or 877 can do. The difference is that the 857 doesn't support QoS, VLAN and other features, beside that will work fine. The following url will help you:
http://www.cisco.com/web/psa/products/tsd_products_support_maintain_and_operate.html
look not much further than here, I've used this to implement Auto-Qos:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps4324/products_configuration_example09186a0080722cdb.shtml

Perfect router for small office (2-3 peoples)

Hello,
I'm trying to find the most cost effective VoIP solution for one of our small branch offices. This office will have no more than 3 peoples, but each person requires to have a PC and Cisco IP phone (voicemail, multiple line, direct inbound, pstn dial out and etc).
Building will provide ethernet hand-off for internet access (part of T1 I guess) so we are planning to create VPN connection between our data center and the local gateway.
As for the PSTN connection, 2 POTS will be provided by LEC. Gateway should be able to accomodate 4 Ports FXO module.
What would be the smallest but the best router can handle firewall/VPN/IP Voice/PSTN for the small office?
Thank you very much for your help in advance.

Hi,
What drives the price up a bit is the FXO requirement. Cisco used to have a router small as the 1751V, but it is EOL now, so the smaller you can get is a 2801. The price is almost the same but the earlier model was a bit more office-friendly due the box shape and size, while the 2801 is a classic rack box 1 unit.
The good thing with the 2801 is that it supports POE (optionally), so if you put one 4 or 9 port ethernet switch (HWIC) in the router, your phones can work without the external power supply.
You can configure the voice system be totally controlled by the router itself with the embedded CCME, or be part of company's CallManager (now CommunicationManager)
Can I give you another advice, try to get ISDN BRI preferentially instead of FXO. You will have all the features like DID, caller-ID, and much easier setup a diagnostic in the router. Plus, if you add a WIC-1B/ST you can also have ISDN backup using the same data facilities.
Please remember to rate useful posts!

What is the X5000 mouse top small sliding switch for?

I just got an HP X5000 wireless mouse and it has a small sliding switch on top behind the wheel. What is this switch for please?
This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi,
There are few guides/manuals on the following link, you can try yourself.
http://h20566.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/psi/manualsResults/?lang=en&cc=us&sp4ts.oid=516432...
Regards.
BH
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Sharing Reports in Small Office

Post Author: pma
CA Forum: General
Hello,
I am hoping this is a basic question for someone. We use Crystal Reports Professional II to report off a MS SQL server. We would like to share report output amoung our small office of about 12 people. I am told that the professional version comes with some type of web deployment system you can put on a server, but I don't see this anywhere. I see the "Crystal Report Server" on Business Object's website, but this seems like overkill for us (not to mention too pricey). Anyone have some simple direction on how to deploy reports? Optimally I could schedule reports and have them viewed in a browser.
Thanks in advance.

Post Author: qcheng
CA Forum: General
Sounds like you have a Crystal Report Designer only. You may need to install BusinessObjectss or Crystal Report server on which you can publish your reports. Once you have published a report on the server, other people can get access the website and schedule the report.

LMS 3.2 and Cisco Small Business Switches

Hi there,
I'm currently using LMS 3.2 to monitor my network. We've recently purchsed a few of the Cisco Small Business Switches, the SF 300-24 model to be exact. They're considered 'managed switches' (tho thier CLI is terrible) and I would like to monitor them in CWLMS. My problem is that once I add it to CS, it doesn't resolve to anything, just sits there as a blue box with a question mark. I'm assuming this means that these devices are not (currently) supported by LMS 3.2 - do you know if that will change, or how I can go about managing this device with LMS 3.2?
Thanks

Unfortunately that series of products is not supported in any version of LMS (or even Cisco Network Assistant - CNA).
Cisco provides the FindIt utility to manage them:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10660/tsd_products_support_series_home.html
Hope this helps.

Small Office Switch Questions

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