On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 03:32:08PM -0500, Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote: > On Thu, 2005-20-01 at 15:58 -0800, Nifty Hat Mitch wrote: > > What about... > > > > Internet > > | > > Cable-DSL Modem > > | > > Network-N-port-HUB > > | | | | .... > This is another option I had considered, and I agree, it's the simplest > design. However, the problem with it is that the business centre owner > very recently completed renovations, and only supplied one Cat5 port to > each office. Since they want to put in Asterisk soon to replace the > old, existing PBX, any tenant not connected to the local LAN will not > have access to the PBX. Ouch... > Any tenants plugged into the first HUB/Switch (in order to receive one > of the public IPs) in your diagram won't be able to use Asterisk, which > would be located behind the firewall.... It is interesting what surfaces with some discusson ;-). It is clear that you will need a serious managed router/ switch at some point in the future. You will need bandwidth for the PBX equivalent as well as bandwidth for generic TCP/IP. I have never seen an 'office' with a single phone line: Main line, private line, fax, answering machine. I think the part that is most unclear to me is "What a tenant is". You should be able to bootstrap things with a good multiport hub and a linux box as a firewall+NAT+proxy+squid network management resource but if you have only one link into each office you will need eventually high bit rates and a small but possibly smart hub in each office. Start as simple as you can. Work your way up to the more complex stuff one feature at a time but design as much as you can now. Tenants are customers. You can never 'remove' a service or feature without grumble grump responses. You can with planning expose some new services over a period of months. With planning each new service will not hobble a previous feature and the tenant will see increased value. In the future, if one is pulling wire do not pull a single link. Of interest the old phone line wires may be usefull for some low speed IP traffic. You will need some backup equipment.... use it to test. -- T o m M i t c h e l l spam unwanted email. SPAM, good eats, and a trademark of Hormel Foods.
