evilrouters.net

i originally wrote the following on 26-sep-2006:

last week i wrote “the joys of a new building“, where i talked about $my_company leasing a building downtown and my job of getting connectivity between there and our main campus.

well, it’s now up and running.

our $vendor had already done their job and tested and verified that they could send a signal both ways. i had one end of the connection set up (the final “patch” from their termination box to our switch), but ended up with an unexpected delay as the other cable didn’t have the right connectors. i ordered the right cable, had it overnighted, and finished up the next day.

i took one of our part-time guys with me to our downtown location to finish up the fiber install and work on some other things. i hooked up the last jumper between the termination box and our switch at that location (an hp procurve 2650, for you geeks) and crossed my fingers.

i plugged my console cable into the switch and my laptop (running linux, of course) and set port #1 to the appropriate vlan for my laptop (my department is isolated on our own subnet and there’s a reservation in dhcp for my laptop). i grabbed the closest patch cable i could find, plugged into port #1 and my laptop, fired up my dhcp client, and watched it obtain the ip address that it should’ve. success!

we’re paying $vendor for the ability to push 100 mbps over this fiber, so that was the next thing i wanted to check. i had previously put an iso image on an internal web server just for this little test. i fired up trusty ol’ wget, feeding it the url of the iso image, and let it go.

in short, 732,336,128 bytes downloaded in 70 seconds. bc tells me that this comes out to 10,461,944 bps, which is pretty close to the theoretical maximum of the link (overhead and such). i’m happy with that!

we moved one user to the building a day or two later and i had him check a few things once his workstation was set up. he reported that everything was working fine. next step is to get our voip phones, configure ‘em, and take ‘em to the site to check things out (qos is set up for the vlan set aside for the voip phones). once that’s done we’ll move the rest of the users to the new site. it promises to be interesting!