XSAN in two buildings

Has anyone setup XSAN in two different buildings/locations? We are looking to setup XSAN but we may be splitting into two locations. I've call our ISP providers and they said they could do a point to point DS3 but that would only get us 90mb max. The other option is running dark fiber (digging, getting "right of way" access, pulling fiber) but its very difficult and costly. Just curious what other are doing? Thanks.

I'm assuming by "two different buildings" you mean the drives and servers in one building and various clients in another.
We have a similar situation where the bulk of our FCP systems are in one building, but we've run out of room and have "exiled" a whole department across the street to another building. We too researched the cost of running a line across the street and couldn't believe how expensive it was. Fortunately, the building across the street is within eyesight of our "main building". Our solution was to acquire a "laser" link to hop across the street. It's kinda of weird at night, 'cause you can actually see the red light on one side and the red "circle" on the target. I forget what the make and model of the the product is, but do a google search for "ethernet over laser" and you should find it.
We have approximately seven clients tied into the X-SAN via gigE sharing. This is not a "full" fibre connect, and so the bandwidth is restricted. However, since we work at Offline RT resolution, we're able to make it work.
Hope this helps.
Mark

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Network two buildings

I need to set up a network connection between two buildings about 450' apart. I have a clean line of site between the two buildings. The apparent obstruction of the building in the middle is not accurate, that building is lower. The central network location is in a basement with concrete walls so I can't run any wires directly to it. I currently have a WRT150N at that location which feeds the main building with no problems.
I also have a WRT54GS with two high gain antennas. I placed this in a window on the second floor of the main building and was able to log into it with a laptop from the other building (weak signal but acceptable). I can put a booster in the center building if I need to.
My questions are:
1) How do I configure the WRT54GS to just be a bridge?
2) Should I put a booster in the middle building? If so, what one and with what antenna?
3) What AP do you recommend I place in the second building?
4) Is there an external antenna I could get for the AP in the second building?
5) Are there directional antennas I could get that would work better?

I have played with signal boosters and bridges, and they cut the speed by at least 50 percent. Yuck!
Your best bet is a roof mounted high gain antenna, on some of the older Linksys routers the antenna disconnected.
CCrane sells some of these antennas.
http://www.ccrane.com/antennas/wifi-antennas/
Not sure what the connector type was though.
Can someone help me here?

Best way to get internet between two buildings???

Hello all! I have some questions about a possible setup I am thinking of running.
I have building that has internet coming into it. 15yds away, I have another building (which is brick) that has no internet options. I was thinking about buying two Airport Extreme's, making one the base and using the other one in the other building the access point for WDS. Then buy a couple of the Airport Expresses to push the signal throughout that building.
Thoughts on this? Is there a better way to get internet between two buildings (without running cables) and then push it through out that building?
I am open to any an all suggestions.
Thanks,
Grant

Welcome to the discussions!
Ethernet is always the best choice for signal strength and reliability. If you do not want to run ethernet cable to the second building, your options are down to ethernet powerline adapters and wireless.
The ethernet powerline adapters work by transmitting the ethernet signal over the AC power line. The difficulty here may be that the other building is on a different electrical circuit, so it may or may not work depending on how the electrical wiring is configured. An electrician could run tests to see if this would work.
The least reliable option is wireless. To have the best chance of working well, the "sending" and "receiving" routers need to be able to "see" each other through a window or other opening. Be sure to test with a laptop in the second location to see if you will have a strong enough signal to work with before you go this route.

Connecting two buildings with 1242AG?

Hi,
I already have a Aironet 1242AG in one building but need to bridge between this building and the building next door. Both buildings have a wired network in the building. The shortest distance is about 50 ft. So I am thinking about getting another 1242AG for the second building, set it in Non-Root Bridge role and change the current 1242AG to Root Bridge role. This way, wired and wireless clients on both sides can get on to the network as a while. Does it sound like a reasonable plan to bridge the two buildings?
One point I am not clear is Cisco's explanation of non-root bridge: "Non-root bridge —Not connected to a wired LAN, associates to a root bridge, supports wireless clients, and supports wired clients." So can I connect the Ethernet port of non-root bridge to the wired LAN in the second building thus connect the wired clients on that network as well? It says "not connected to a wired LAN" but also says "supports wired clients."
Is "Workgroup Bridge" role also an option? Thanks,

Surendra and Dmantill,
Thank you both for the tips! One more question if I may:
Based on the fact that the closest distance between the two buildings is about 50 fts (will put by the windows), do I really need high gain antenna (part #AIR-ANT1728) instead of the "standard" antenna for 1242AG (part #AIR-ANT4941)?They both are omni-directional antenna but cost delta is 7 times.
I'd ask these kind of questions to my vendor but their sales keep pushing for fancy outdoor model that costs > $3K. I am trying to cut costs whereever I can, especially considering the distance is only about 50ft.
Thank you again!

Which outdoor access points to connect two buildings (500ft distance)?

Hello,
We have a client that needs to wirelessly connect two buildings at their location, around 500ft over a parking lot. There are no significant line-of-sight obstructions. Which outdoor access points would be most suitable for this, and what is the maximum speed we can expect from such a connection?
Thanks
Tim

You can configure point-to-point wireless bridging.
Wireless Bridges Point-to-Point Link Configuration Example
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/tech/tk722/tk809/technologies_configuration_example09186a008058f53e.shtml
Next, you can use either indoor access point or outdoor/mesh access point. I'd recommend indoor. Since it's going to be point-to-point, no need to get an AP that can support 802.11n because it's not supported. This brings your choices down to a Cisco 1242 (dual radios).
In regards to antennaes, AIR-ANT2410Y is a contender. Have a look at the complete portfolio for more information.
Cisco Aironet 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Antennas and Accessories
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/wireless/ps7183/ps469/product_data_sheet09186a008022b11b.html
Hope this helps. Please don't forget to rate useful posts. Thanks.

I have two Buildings i need to connect via wireless

I have one Building with The Main Internet Connection. It has 1- wireless-G access point (wap54g v3) and 1-wireless-B ethernet bridge (wet11 v2)
The other Structure i cant run wire cause of a water hazzard between the buildings. Building two has 1- Wireless-N Broadband Router(wrt300n)
With These 3 Products what can i do using what i have to connect, connect building 1 to building 2 via wireless? Or am i in need of another wireless router of sorts?
help and documentation would help. I just was dropped into this and had a day or two to fingure a solution out.
Thank you

The Computers which are connected to WRT300N on Building Two are they able to go online throught the Router? Then i would suggest you to get an Ethernet Bridge, As your ethernet bridge is older B series and it wont communicate with your Router properly, Either you can Get a G Series or N Series Ethernet Bridge ( WET54G , WET600N).
On Building 1 you need to input the wireless settings as you have set on your WRT300N Router. Once you configure all the settings on your Bridge, then you can connect the Bridge to an switch and then connect your Access Point to the Swtich and configure all the settings on your WAP54G. And this will let all your computers go online Wirelessly and Wired as well.

Range of Airport Extreme between two buildings

We will soon have a studio in our barn 130 feet from the house wired with cable internet. Will Airport Extreme send the signal that far and work well—no trees, clear line of sight, with basic barn construction and insulation in the studio/apartment walls between base and eventual second computer.

In theory it should work. But since it really depends on the RF environment at your location, the only way you will know for sure is to try it.

Connecting wirelessly between two buildings

Last winter, the network was setup with a Linksys WRT54GX4 and communication between the office and another building opposite was possible. As the year progressed foliage returned to the nearby trees and the connection has failed since.
I am thinking of using another WRT54GX4 in the building opposite the office building to establish a reliable connection to the office network.
Would this purpose be served?

GV is correct and i would recommend the WAP54GP or the WAP54GPE if you wished to mount the WAP to the exterior of the opposite building for a better signal strength. The WAP45GPE also has a internal high gain antenna. Just a thought but may help with your set up.
Message Edited by Ikester on 11-02-2007 11:17 PM
Richard Aichner (Ikester)

I can't get a reliable wifi signal between my Airport Express in the office and Express in the house and i can't get a cable between the two. Any suggestions for getting internet connection in both buildings?

I need to get internet to both the house and my office, which is in a separate building approx 20m from the house. I was advised by Apple to buy an Airport Express, set it up on one or other building, and connect wirelessly to the other. Tried that, but couldn't get a reliable signal.
I was then advised to buy another Airport Express and use it as an expander in the other building. Trouble is, i can't get a reliable wireless signal between the two Expresses, so it keeps dropping the connection, and is slow when it is connected.
I rang Apple again and was told that i could try a third Airport Express between the two existing ones, but that is impossible as there is only outdoors between the two.
It would be very difficult and expensive to get an ethernet cable between the two buildings (have to cut through concrete etc), and I see from the discussion forums that an Airport Extreme has the same wireless signal as an Express, so replacing one of the Expresses with an Extreme seems unlikely to resolve the problem. Can anyone think of any other options?

The Powerline adapters mentioned by edex67 are your only hope if you cannot run an Ethernet cable.
Even if the home and office are on the same electrical circuit, you won't really know how well the Powerline adapters might work until you actually try them out at your location.
For that reason, it would be a good idea to understand the store's return policy before you buy.

My situation is two separate buildings 100 feet apart. can time capsule provide wireless internet in both?

can time capsule provide wireless internet service between two homes 100 feet apart?

OK.. starting to get the picture..
You should have run ethernet between the two buildings not cable.
Does the cable for the second building start inside your house.. ie do you have a termination for cable or does the second building come in directly from the street.
If you have cable link between the two buildings you can buy ethernet to cable adapters.. plug one it at each end and simply extend by plugging it into the router on the main cable link.. simple and far superior to wireless.
Otherwise you need to work out what kind of budget you want to spend to do this..
You can buy professional or semi-pro stuff from companies like ubiquiti which are far superior to domestic wireless link.. or if you want to do it on the cheap figure out what is the min speed you can live with.
I can give you instructions for using a pair of old airport.. in WDS.. or new ones.. but the new ones will cost far more and no gain.. you can usually pick up the old discus ones for $10 on ebay and they work great.
But don't try to do it without a link.. ie a specific set of AP in one house plus repeater in the other. As anything you do without making a link will just fall down or become unreliable.
You must have a pair of matched items.. You want to do this with WDS.. and you want something with good range. If you want N wireless that is fine.. but buy a pair of N wireless routers that can do WDS with full WPA2 security. eg full N wireless edimax stuff is not bad. TP-Link also not bad.. but if you want to run airplay and bonjour etc.. anything apple network then stick to apple. You will find that non-apple wireless routers will often not work with apple specific protocols.. as they are just that.. non-specified.

Redundant mail without xsan?

Scenario:
Two buildings, A and B. Both have 1 internet line each. Both have 1 computer running OS X server. Currently all of our mail runs through the server in building A. I know this is not ideal since if the internet connection goes down in building A, our mail goes down too. From my understanding, an MX record could be created so that all mail would be routed to building B when building A goes down. Is there an easy way to link the datastores together (some sort of replication or sync?) so that mail will appear to have never gone down?
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
-Matt
PS: I have a proposal in now to get another connection added to building A however it may not happen for some time.
Message was edited by: Matt Edman

It's tricky to get multiple mail servers writing to the same mail store (e.g. user mailboxes) at the same time. Issues of concurrent access mean that if both servers try to save a user's message at the same time, bad things can happen. That's the element that XSAN addresses - arbitrating which server has access to the files.
That said, all is not lost.
First you need to consider the duration and frequency at which building A's network goes down - are you trying to engineer a solution for something that happens rarely?
If Building A's network goes down for 5 minutes once a year then the pain and cost of failover (and fallback) may outweigh the problem. If it goes down daily for an hour, though, then that's a different problem (probably one I'd raise with the ISP in question, but that's a different issue )
Second, are building A and building B's connected directly, or do they communicate over the same internet connections?
By this I mean is Building A's internet connection goes down can the server in Building B still talk to it over some internal network, or would it try to use the broken internet link?
If they can't communicate directly then I don't see much of a solution anyway - there's no way for Server B to update the mail stores anyway.
If they can communicate directly then the simplest solution would be to setup Server B as a simple mail relay for your domain. In this way, remote mail servers send their messages to Server B (via MX records in DNS), Server B accepts the message and relays it over the internal network to Server A.
Server A is still running, and has access to the mail store, it just can't talk to the internet, but it doesn't need to in this scenario. More importantly, Server B doesn't need direct access to the mail stores - it's just passing the messages to Server A to deal with as it would normally.
None of this, though, addresses the issue of user mailboxes. For internal users it's not an issue - they can still access the POP/IMAP service on Server A, regardless of the building's internet connection. External users, however, wouldn't be able to connect since Building A's internet link is down.
Solutions to this one are harder since there's no automatic failover technology for POP or IMAP protocols (unlike MX records for SMTP). Typically this is addressed by changing your DNS to send external users to a second IP address (e.g. one on the server in Building B), and that's where the pain of failover comes in.
If your DNS TTL is set to something typical like 4 hours then it could take up to 4 hours for external clients to notice a DNS change, in which time their mail client will continue to try to connect to the server in Building A. If the network comes back up in that time then the user didn't need the failover anyway so you wasted your time in setting up the DNS failover.
Some people overcome this by setting very low TTLs on the mail server DNS records (e.g. 5 minutes). This causes the mail client to lookup the mail server address more often, so it will notice a switch faster, but at the cost of additional load on your DNS server.
There's also the question of how to change the DNS. Some people opt for an automatic switch, others prefer a manual switch (where someone goes in and changes the server address in DNS). Both have their pros and cons. Personally I prefer the manual approach since you can decide whether or not to fail over client traffic based on expectation of outage duration (if you think the network is likely to be down for only a few minutes then don't bother switching the DNS since no one's going to notice it anyway).

N bridge between two 1252an in bridge mode at 5GHz

I've read in some of the cisco documentation on the 1250 series that root bridge or non root bridge modes are "not tested". They don't say "not supported". I have a client that could use a high bandwidth link between two buildings that are 100' or so apart. The fiber link has already been busted twice. Heavy heavy trucks kill the ground concrete. I have configed a 54Mbps solution with two 1242G's and some cisco yagi's. But, if an N bridge is possible with two 1252AG's, and go faster than the 54Mbps..I'd go with that setup.
Cisco documentation says the bridge modes show up in the 1252 webgui and are selectable. They just end it with "not tested".
Any thoughts?

It became supported in recent versions of the 1250 IOS.
|With this feature, the Cisco Aironet 1140 and 1250 Series can be configured for both access point and bridge functions. Bridging support on 802.11n access points offers added performance, reliability and throughput for basic wireless LAN coverage, wireless LAN coverage with wireless backhaul, and more traditional bridging applications.|
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/prod/collateral/wireless/ps5678/ps6087/product_bulletin_c25-560118_ps6973_Products_Bulletin.html
Nicolas
===
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Wireless connection between 2 buildings

My office is in a small separate structure on my residential property about 100 feet away from my 2 story house (both buildings are mostly wood frame, a lot of windows).
In the office is my computer system – internet access and a simple network:
Cable Modem
Linksys 2.4 GHz Wireless-B Router
2 PC's with Wireless-B
Mac Pro
Everything works excellent inside the office building (using wireless for the network and wired for the internet).
I just purchased a MacBook Pro for the house to access the internet and my files on my PC in the office. I tested it with the Linksys and just barely picked up some signal but mostly nothing.
I tried a Netgear WNDR3300 - their latest dual-band, with 5.0 N and 2.4 G. A very nice unit, worked out of the box, but no real additional signal strength.
I was thinking about trying 2 AirPort Extremes, one in the office building and one in the house.
What is someone’s best suggestion on how to create a solid wireless connection between 2 buildings (about 100 feet apart), not necessarily Apple equipment, and short of running an Ethernet cable between the 2 buildings.
I would like full wireless and wired access inside the office, and full wireless and wired access inside the house.

Do you have direct line-of-sight between the two buildings?
Wireless Bridges Point-to-Point Link Configuration Example

Recommended products for connection between buildings 50 meters apart

Hi
I have a client that requires a connection between their two buildings 50 meters apart. If possible they require bandwidth up to 54Mbps. Currently they only have a switch in either building.
Can anyone recommend a solution for this? Will they need two bridges or do they need 1 bridge and 1 AP?
Many thanks

In europe the best way to do this is to use a cisco 2 x 1300 if you are in the states you can use 2 x 1400. However the 1300 is more flexible.

Wireless connection (around 500m) between 2 buildings ?

Hi,
I'm trying to install a wireless connection between 2 buildings.
Tthere is around 500m between the 2 buildings...
I don't know if with Cisco is it possible to do this ? If it is possible, which models of AP's can I use ? Which antennas ?
Thanks for your feedback,
Alexis

Do you have direct line-of-sight between the two buildings?
Wireless Bridges Point-to-Point Link Configuration Example

XSAN in two buildings

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