Priority Queue

So, a lot has changed in the last year. The big news is, Cisco is now in servers! I was going to wait a while, see how the dust settled, and wait to play around with them until Cisco’s voice apps were approved to run on their own servers.

Well, during that waiting period, something exciting happened – Cisco dropped the price on their servers bigtime. They are now competitive with every other major server vendor out there. This changes things!

Sure, they meet all the requirements of an enterprise class server. Good OS support, out of band management, reliability, power, etc. They also have a few unique features. read more »

I recently did a somewhat complex install of a Cisco 2800 Integrated Services Router. I enabled many of the features that come standard in the Advanced IP Services IOS, and thought it would be useful to show what a relatively current configuration would look like.

What made this installation fun was the use of object groups on the 2800 router. That is a new feature in the 12.4.20T version of code that made things interesting. The router has a GUI, but of course everything was set up in command line. I learned some neat things from this install, and based on the experience, I created a clean reference config for discussion purposes. This example is for the NAT and VPN, I will leave the voice configuration for a different example. Also, I did not set up SSL VPN on this box, nor did I use the newer version of firewall – this one is based on CBAC. read more »

It seems like one of the major tasks that I have been doing on a daily basis for the last ten years is creating network designs for people. Since a large part of the business that my company does is put in place a complete IP phone system into organizations that have between 50 and 3000 users, me and the other design guys create a lot of designs. 

Most organizations do not upgrade their LAN to prepare for the future – most of them don’t touch the network as long as it is running properly and supporting the user’s applications. When starting the planning process for putting a secure voice system on the network, that takes the network requirements to another level.

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These are the most common, current Cisco products that are used at organizations that have between 100 and 3000 hosts on the system. The links go directly to the datasheets, and bypass all the annoying marketing and obsolete product links that are found on the Cisco website.

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Last year we learned a lesson about POE switches the hard way. Cisco had some nice new gigabit phones start shipping, and had been shipping gigabit POE switches to power them. One of our customers wanted gigabit ethernet to their desktop, so we specified the gig phones with the gig switches. Since all the switches were going to be in one closet, we recommended four 48 port POE switches, along with 120 POE phones. Everything was going great, until we started putting the phones out on the desktop. read more »

Even though it is very convenient to look up pricing for servers, switches, routers, firewalls and the like online, that is the worst way to purchase. I have been on the inside of IT sales for a long time, and can give you many reasons why you should by from a local Value Added Reseller, as they are known:

1. Best price. If you talk with a local reseller, and either pretend or actually let them help make a recommendation read more »

I have talked with a number of public safety organizations over the last few years about how they extend network connectivity to patrol officers that make stops. The benefits are tremendous. By having the ability to run a car tag and a driver’s license through the Georgia Crime Information Center, the officer is able to immediately identify individuals with warrants out for their arrest, stolen cars, and any number of other issues.

The ability to run this information through the GCIC database is always available, by calling in the information over the radio, and having it looked up, but at that point it sometimes becomes more trouble than its worth. read more »

It is so amazingly fast to get things done when you have a few linux boxes in the network. We are doing a few things to optimize our admittedly staid website, and those changes will roll out over the next few months.

I added wordpress to the server and linked it in quickly since it is packaged so nicely. Just ssh in, quickly type in the things to do, and we are up and running. Nice!