@scottalanmiller said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

@dave247 said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

@scottalanmiller said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

@dashrender said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

I do like the idea of many smaller posts - but it also runs into the problem of many thing to respond to at once. While I'm no where near as fast as Scott, I can typically type two to three small posts before the OP (or anyone other than Scott) replies to my first reply. So unlike your

I like red.
So do I, but have you considered orange,
no but, ...

you aren't having a real back and forth because you run into the same problem as the wall of text issue. I real time conversation where all involved parties get the information simultaneously, in a forum you have people jumping in in the middle and fleeing, or someone who just throws out 5 ideas, each in their own post before any responses are made, and eventually many people just stop reading anything but the last few posts.

I'm not sure you can solve this problem, but it's just good to know it's there.

But smaller posts make it easier to respond. No matter how much time you have, making it faster and easier helps you. Wall of text in the same situation would mean no ability to respond at all.

I noticed this with how you post back in Spiceworks and I was like, what the hell is this guy doing. But having broken up posts to respond to is kind of nice. It becomes not nice when there are many of them peppered throughout the whole forum page. Then you have to scroll around like crazy to find what it is you need to respond to.

You still have to scroll a lot with a wall of text, too. The multiple postings doesn't really make for much more scrolling. And it can only happen if no one is actively responding on a thread, if there was an active discussion it can't happen. The effect that you see is generally created by someone kicking it off via a wall of text to which many responses need to be generated at once. So walls of text actually are the key source of the non-wall of text system that many people dislike.

Usually people do that thing where they break up a wall of text in one post and reply to sections. It's the best of both worlds. Example:

Creation vs Evolutoin debate

blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah

Well actually your point is invalid here because...

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

Ah yes, you are correct here because...

blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

I can't argue with that logic

@scottalanmiller said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

@dashrender said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

I do like the idea of many smaller posts - but it also runs into the problem of many thing to respond to at once. While I'm no where near as fast as Scott, I can typically type two to three small posts before the OP (or anyone other than Scott) replies to my first reply. So unlike your

I like red.
So do I, but have you considered orange,
no but, ...

you aren't having a real back and forth because you run into the same problem as the wall of text issue. I real time conversation where all involved parties get the information simultaneously, in a forum you have people jumping in in the middle and fleeing, or someone who just throws out 5 ideas, each in their own post before any responses are made, and eventually many people just stop reading anything but the last few posts.

I'm not sure you can solve this problem, but it's just good to know it's there.

But smaller posts make it easier to respond. No matter how much time you have, making it faster and easier helps you. Wall of text in the same situation would mean no ability to respond at all.

I noticed this with how you post back in Spiceworks and I was like, what the hell is this guy doing. But having broken up posts to respond to is kind of nice. It becomes not nice when there are many of them peppered throughout the whole forum page. Then you have to scroll around like crazy to find what it is you need to respond to.

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

Well, thanks everyone for all your input. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do regarding the VoIP situation, but I suppose I should read up about FreePBX or NTG or something...

Not a bad idea But to be clear, no one has specifically recommended any specific product or approach, just offered that Cisco is a terrible one, and getting a reseller instead of a consultant guarantees a bad result and it is clear that the reseller is trying to take advantage of the situation.

It's not that FreePBX or even NTG is the "right" answer. Is that you have a clearly bad answer arrived at through a clearly in appropriate business decision making process that lacks both business and IT oversights. So all of the checks and balances that should exist in a healthy business are being skipped.

Well I asked my boss if I could check out alternative voice systems for comparison and he said it's my call... so it looks like I have the chance to do things the right way. That being said, I have no idea where to start. I looked at the NTG website and didn't find much valuable info, nor on the FreePBX site.. also, the vultr website looks like it has nothing to do with telephony and is instead a webhosting platform.. so I don't understand that...

Maybe I could give someone a call and go over some plans or something??

Well, thanks everyone for all your input. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do regarding the VoIP situation, but I suppose I should read up about FreePBX or NTG or something...

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@black3dynamite said in VLAN confusion:

@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

Then you change your few static devices (if you do not have only a few static systems, you have other issues).

What JB means by this is - he uses static assignments in DHCP for things like printers. This allows you to reboot a printer to get the new settings when things like this change.

Servers are about the only thing that should be set statically, the rest can rely on Static DHCP assignment.

Domain Controller would pretty much be the only server that needs to be manually set to static.

Yeah but if DNS and/or DHCP went down, you will probably have trouble getting to your servers. Static IP's on all system critical servers seems like a better decision since they will function in almost any environment state.

Not unless you have a stupidly short lease time. I use 8 hour leases on most LAN stuff. Yeah it tries to renew every 4, but it will not require a DHCP server until 8 hours.

I set mine to three days.

Then you won't have a problem if the DHCP server is missing.

Are all the address leases synchronized to the same time or is do leases expire x amount of days after each individual host received it's address? If that's the case, there may be staggered renewals and I wouldn't know what system is going to expire when.. (I just realized I didn't know this)

You are correct that they happen randomly based on the machine that requested, but with a 3 day lease, the odds are low to be greatly impacted for any minor outage.

So if a couple of servers have leases that expire 10 minutes after my DHCP server goes down (DC dies or something) then that's going to be more systems down. I wouldn't want to risk it..

A bit of perspective here...

First of all why would your DHCP server be down and not get failed over or restored quickly.

Next, all of your systems should be rebooted on a regular basis, so you will know quite firmly the status of your DHCP leases on the servers without even needing to check.

Finally, with a 3 day (72 hours) lease it is impossible for you to lose a DHCP address in less than 36 hours because all DHCP clients ask for a renew at 50% of lease time (or should). So your little doomsday scenario simply cannot happen.

I don't know, I was just saying like worst-case scenario, like if I was out of town on vacation and couldn't remote in or something. I do have two domain controllers but my second DHCP range is not active yet since I don't have enough free IP addresses. I was expecting to have our new phone system on a separate network and VLAN, which would free up addresses on the current config. I guess the alternative is to increase the size of my subnet, like we talked about earlier.

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@black3dynamite said in VLAN confusion:

@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

Then you change your few static devices (if you do not have only a few static systems, you have other issues).

What JB means by this is - he uses static assignments in DHCP for things like printers. This allows you to reboot a printer to get the new settings when things like this change.

Servers are about the only thing that should be set statically, the rest can rely on Static DHCP assignment.

Domain Controller would pretty much be the only server that needs to be manually set to static.

Yeah but if DNS and/or DHCP went down, you will probably have trouble getting to your servers. Static IP's on all system critical servers seems like a better decision since they will function in almost any environment state.

Not unless you have a stupidly short lease time. I use 8 hour leases on most LAN stuff. Yeah it tries to renew every 4, but it will not require a DHCP server until 8 hours.

I set mine to three days.

Then you won't have a problem if the DHCP server is missing.

Are all the address leases synchronized to the same time or is do leases expire x amount of days after each individual host received it's address? If that's the case, there may be staggered renewals and I wouldn't know what system is going to expire when.. (I just realized I didn't know this)

You are correct that they happen randomly based on the machine that requested, but with a 3 day lease, the odds are low to be greatly impacted for any minor outage.

So if a couple of servers have leases that expire 10 minutes after my DHCP server goes down (DC dies or something) then that's going to be more systems down. I wouldn't want to risk it..

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@black3dynamite said in VLAN confusion:

@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

Then you change your few static devices (if you do not have only a few static systems, you have other issues).

What JB means by this is - he uses static assignments in DHCP for things like printers. This allows you to reboot a printer to get the new settings when things like this change.

Servers are about the only thing that should be set statically, the rest can rely on Static DHCP assignment.

Domain Controller would pretty much be the only server that needs to be manually set to static.

Yeah but if DNS and/or DHCP went down, you will probably have trouble getting to your servers. Static IP's on all system critical servers seems like a better decision since they will function in almost any environment state.

Not unless you have a stupidly short lease time. I use 8 hour leases on most LAN stuff. Yeah it tries to renew every 4, but it will not require a DHCP server until 8 hours.

I set mine to three days.

Then you won't have a problem if the DHCP server is missing.

Are all the address leases synchronized to the same time or do leases expire x amount of days after each individual host received it's address? If that's the case, there may be staggered renewal times and I wouldn't know what system is going to expire when.. (I just realized I didn't know this)

@black3dynamite said in VLAN confusion:

@coliver said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@coliver said in VLAN confusion:

@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:

@coliver said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

in the meantime, are there any good voice solution alternatives that you guys could provide? Part of our requirement for our phones is that we may not want to have it cloud-hosted due to the fact that our internet connection goes down every so often during business hours. YES I get that this is another problem that should be resolved vs applying a bandaid, but we live out in the country and have limited ISP options (Spec---m and Centu---ink).

FreePBX will probably meet your needs as it generally meets the needs of most people. It's opensource and free, can be hosted in house, and integrates with any SIP based IP Phone. There are people, here in the community that support it.

And will likely cost 1/10 what Cisco will cost. Seriously, you should give @JaredBusch a call and ask him to quote you a full on replacement and compare it's cost to Cisco.

1/10? I'd be surprised if it cost 1/100th.

Well, I'm not that cheap of a date.

Haven't seen Cisco pricing lately?

Ever heard of a Cisco voice router costing $250,000?

Is that a real price for a router??!

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@black3dynamite said in VLAN confusion:

@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

Then you change your few static devices (if you do not have only a few static systems, you have other issues).

What JB means by this is - he uses static assignments in DHCP for things like printers. This allows you to reboot a printer to get the new settings when things like this change.

Servers are about the only thing that should be set statically, the rest can rely on Static DHCP assignment.

Domain Controller would pretty much be the only server that needs to be manually set to static.

Yeah but if DNS and/or DHCP went down, you will probably have trouble getting to your servers. Static IP's on all system critical servers seems like a better decision since they will function in almost any environment state.

Not unless you have a stupidly short lease time. I use 8 hour leases on most LAN stuff. Yeah it tries to renew every 4, but it will not require a DHCP server until 8 hours.

I set mine to three days.

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

They've mentioned setting up a VLAN for the phone system and setting up a voice router for it.

Of course he has, your CIO decided on this path when he brought in a Cisco networking salesman to screw the company. That decision was made ahead of time. Cisco uses their phones as a leader to get companies to buy inappropriate networking equipment. This is a completely "by the book" unscrupulous sales tactic for VoIP sales people.

Well we are probably going to go with them and I might not have much of a say... so it's going to be difficult for me to try to pressure these people to install a system in a way different than how they usually do it. Is there any material I can reference to "prove" that VLAN's are not needed and that voice and data are fine on the same network? Actually, now that i think of it, our current voice and data are on the same network and we have no issues.

Also, regarding QoS, didn't you mention something about having the QoS set up on the VoIP RTP service rather than the voice VLAN?

Things to take to your CEO (I'd honestly share this thread with him and tell him that I'm local, have an SEC background, have worked with Ray Dalio, have been in the biggest banks and hedges in the world, and will happily stop by to discuss financial ethics and rogue actors issues with him to explain the problem being perceived) would include...

https://www.smbitjournal.com/2011/07/never-get-advice-from-a-reseller-or-vendor/
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2016/06/buyers-and-sellers-agents-in-it/
https://www.smbitjournal.com/2017/07/the-social-contract-of-sales/

And...

Youtube Video

Scott, I watched/listened to your video. That puts it very very well. Do you have that in text format at all (it looked like you were reading from something). If so, I could probably use that as an informational source to submit to my boss.

@black3dynamite said in VLAN confusion:

@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

Then you change your few static devices (if you do not have only a few static systems, you have other issues).

What JB means by this is - he uses static assignments in DHCP for things like printers. This allows you to reboot a printer to get the new settings when things like this change.

Servers are about the only thing that should be set statically, the rest can rely on Static DHCP assignment.

Domain Controller would pretty much be the only server that needs to be manually set to static.

Yeah but if DNS and/or DHCP went down, you will probably have trouble getting to your servers. Static IP's on all system critical servers seems like a better decision since they will function in almost any environment state.

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

So in that diagram, the bottlenecks would remain even if you segmented by network addressing. As long as the data needs to get from the core to the edge over the same LAG group, the bottleneck remains identical, regardless of the number or segmentation of the switches out at the edge.

Yeah, I get that. At this point, I'm all for having our phones and computers on the same network (as our current system is)... I just need to convince my boss now. I've only recently persuaded him to not have us use actual separate switches (not sure if you remember that conversation).

I should also try to figure out another possible voice solution, otherwise we are likely going with Cisco through that company... slams head down on desk

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

For your own learning, try working backwards. Where in a switch do you perceive bottlenecks or performances issues? See if you can figure out what you are picturing, maybe there is a misconception that we can address.

Well at this point, I see the potential bottlenecks being at the points where our switches connect to each other. We currently have six layer 3 Dell PowerConnect switches that all connect to each other via Link Aggregation/portshield groups. At the "center", we have all our servers and computers in our main building that connect to a stack of switches (stacked with mini-SAS) and then on that stack, there are a couple of LAG groups consisting of 3 ports each that run off to four different closets. Actually, one of them is our basement, which ... you know, screw it. I'm uploading a diagram I just did in MS Paint so you can see our layout. I'm aware that there are issues with the design:

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

Think of a switch like a big open parking lot. You can enter from dozesn or different locations and exit at any of dozens of locations. You are a packet, obviously. The parking lot is huge and there is enough room for everyone to get to where they need to go. Each connection is unique, from point to point, the only points of congestion come at the driveway, if a single driveway wants to send out too many cars at once or take too many in.

A simple switch, like a 24 port GigE switch, will often have a 40Gb/s backplane. That means that even if every port on the switch is at full capacity, it can't saturate the backplane. There is no capacity advantage by splitting up the traffic further, the switch is already handling it all at full speed. The ports are the bottlenecks, not the switch.

Good analogy, and I think I've gotten this concept more fully as of late. One of the terms I hadn't heard of before starting my job was the "backplane" word. I'm still not 100% certain on what it means, but I assume it's just the connecting board that all circuits pass through.. like a backbone or something.

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

Sorry, let me change the term "VLAN" to "switch". Is it best practice to avoid having multiple networks running on a single switch? I just said VLAN because of the default VLAN..

The entire concepts of subnetting and VLANing are to run multiple networks on a single switch Nothing wrong with that in the least. Switches are expected to run multiple networks, that's just normal and exactly what they are meant to do.

So if I had 20 different /24 networks running on the same switch stack (for whatever reason), and all of them are on VLAN 0 (I'm just saying VLAN here because everything will at least be on the default VLAN), then there will be no traffic issues whatsoever?

No, no issues, not from traffic. Things like DHCP wouldn't work, obviously.

MY MIND IS BLOWN

LOL, I get the impression that somewhere in your thinking on switches, you are associating them with hubs or something. The concerns that you have sound like something we'd have worried about in the 1990s. But you aren't that old to have learned networking prior to 2000, are you?

I'm 34. I started college in 2002, probably around the time hubs were almost completely dead. I did order a few on ebay and then I got a free "smart hub" that I didn't really do too much with aside.. I had a few classes on networking but nothing too deep and my ability to study and learn used to be pretty terrible, so yes, I probably started building my understanding around hubs and classful networking.

At least I do fully understand classless subnetting now though.. I just need to iron out the rest of the kinks in how I understand this stuff.

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

Let's step back and work on this concept of "traffic issues." What is a "traffic issue" to you and where do you think that it comes from?

Not to keep back-peddling.. but maybe I should have just said "issues". Maybe not even that. I'm just asking about best practice here. Simply: is it supposed to be one network per switch? But you answered no. I'm not sure where I got my assumptions, but at least I'm trying to work out my understanding of these concepts here..

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

Sorry, let me change the term "VLAN" to "switch". Is it best practice to avoid having multiple networks running on a single switch? I just said VLAN because of the default VLAN..

The entire concepts of subnetting and VLANing are to run multiple networks on a single switch Nothing wrong with that in the least. Switches are expected to run multiple networks, that's just normal and exactly what they are meant to do.

So if I had 20 different /24 networks running on the same switch stack (for whatever reason), and all of them are on VLAN 0 (I'm just saying VLAN here because everything will at least be on the default VLAN), then there will be no traffic issues whatsoever?

No, no issues, not from traffic. Things like DHCP wouldn't work, obviously.

MY MIND IS BLOWN

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

Sorry, let me change the term "VLAN" to "switch". Is it best practice to avoid having multiple networks running on a single switch? I just said VLAN because of the default VLAN..

The entire concepts of subnetting and VLANing are to run multiple networks on a single switch Nothing wrong with that in the least. Switches are expected to run multiple networks, that's just normal and exactly what they are meant to do.

So if I had 20 different /24 networks running on the same switch stack (for whatever reason), and all of them are on VLAN 0 (I'm just saying VLAN here because everything will at least be on the default VLAN), then there will be no traffic issues whatsoever?

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

Stepping back in the discussion a bit.. I didn't understand your reply here. Isn't it best-practice to have a single network on a VLAN?

Absolutely not. VLANs are for security and management, only. Period. No other purpose for them. No best practice adds VLANs to other concerns. VLANs are widely used, because security and management needs create cause for them. But those are the singular reasons for which VLANs are sensible.

Sorry, let me change the term "VLAN" to "switch". Is it best practice to avoid having multiple networks running on a single switch? I just said VLAN because of the default VLAN..

@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:

@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:

Then you change your few static devices (if you do not have only a few static systems, you have other issues).

What JB means by this is - he uses static assignments in DHCP for things like printers. This allows you to reboot a printer to get the new settings when things like this change.

Servers are about the only thing that should be set statically, the rest can rely on Static DHCP assignment.

oh man.. the printers.. I forgot about all the statically assigned printers we have. My company has about 30 statically assigned printers. That will be a huge pain in the butt to change..