Pretty cool network projects I'm setting up...

[YeOldeStonecat]

Picked up a client in Florida. He wants 3x locations done, and this week I'm prepping the equip to ship out.
1) His main residence...KILLER large house on the waterfront in Jupiter.
2) His new lab a mile or so away
3) And the fun part....his Bahamas house. The first two are pretty standard setups, I'm using all Ubiquiti, all 3 have a Dream Machine Pro, a USW-Pro-24-POE switch, In Wall APs, FlexHDs. But the fun part is the Bahamas setup.

The ISP connection terminates in his generator buiding....bottom of the hill.
Main house is up atop the hill.
On the other side of the property, down the hill, waterfront, his dock.

So....at the generator building, where his cable modem will hand off, I have a Unifi Industrial Switch, and 1x of the Unifi Building to Building bridges.
At his house, facing down at his generator building, will be the other UBB bridge.
In his house, the Dream Machine Pro and 24 port Pro switch.

Now I have to link the UBB's to the cable modem. Yet, other equipment in his generator building need to be on the LAN. So I'm using VLANs for this.
UBBs plugged into ports on the switches that have all VLANs, but I also have a VLAN 10 set to ISP only...so on the Industrial switch in the generator hut, port 1 to the ISP Gateway, port 2 to the UBB, ports 3-8 for other equipment.
Port 1 is untagging VLAN 10.
Port 2 has default VLAN, plus VLAN 10 tagged, plus his camera VLAN (12)
Ports 3-8 have profiles for POE, default VLAN, and VLAN 12 tagged...so they pick up his internal network.

Back in the USW 24 switch in his house, VLAN2 to the UBB, same VLAN setup as above. And port 1...has VLAN10 untagged...and it faces the WAN port of the UDM Pro.

I will have another pair of UBB's...and another Industrial switch, doing a run to his dock...linked to his internal LAN...for cameras and wifi.

 

[Metanis]

Pictures! Or it didn't happen!

 

[Porthos]

Are you personally going to both these locations or paying someone else to do it? Seems like a great time for a vacation to those 2 locations.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Are you personally going to both these locations or paying someone else to do it? Seems like a great time for a vacation to those 2 locations.

I wish. Got back from Florida about a month ago, was down there for a little over 4 weeks.
Just shipping it all to him, he's pretty capable of connecting/installing.


Most of the stuff boxed up in the back ground here, some on the rack, these 2 items on my desk..

 

[HCHTech]

I'm pretty sure a trip, you know, just to make sure he hooked everything up correctly, and to test everything is going to be required. You couldn't sleep at night if you didn't make sure - it's really for the customer's benefit.

The biggest question I have is where did you source all of that Unifi stuff - Availability has been so unpredictable...

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

The biggest question I have is where did you source all of that Unifi stuff - Availability has been so unpredictable...

The only 2x things we've been starving for....
*USG's....
and I have a couple of projects, including this one, where I wanted a
*Flex Switch, to go into the Flex utility boxes...for docks
(I have a dock to deal with in this project, plus another marina project coming soon). So for this project, since he flies high budget, had no problem doing an Industrial switch for the dock. Probably better off with that anyways, higher heat tolerance for the Bahamas.

The USG 3p's...I'm pretty sure UI disco'd them. I have not seen an official announcement, but...they've basically be absent from disties for quite a while now. And no mention of a replacement yet. There's the Dream Machine...but....IMO, that's not a direct replacement of the USG...I'd rather see one you can provision to your own controller (not a built in controller0. UI recently released the UXG-Pro...which is a sweet 1U rack mountable gateway...so that's the replacement for the USG-Pro-4. UI had some Unifi gateway in the early access store a bit over a year ago, was larger than the USG-3p, but not as large as the Pro4...I thought that was going to make it to release, but it didn't.

So we stocked up on the UXG-Pro...and some USW Pro 24 and 48 switches, and armfulls of the USW-8 and 16 Lite switches.
AP's we've never seen a shortage of.

Basically ..when one of our resources has stock...we buy it up and stock our shelves. And we utilize about a half dozen resources. The usual big ones....Streakwave, Ingram, D&H, B&H Video, Double Radius....and then a few others...Flytech, Hummingbird. Also...when UI has stock in their stores....yeah...we snag it. Granted....it's MSRP and there's shipping...so price to client is higher. But...we have stock and get it done. That's been our secret sauce for the past 2 years of this "covid shortage" crap. Over the past 2 years I've seen people in tech groups saying they can't find UI product, but I noticed...shortages come and go. And when there is stock...we grab a good amount of it...and that holds us through the dry spells pretty well. Usually keep >2 if not 4 of everything for each model of gateways and switches...and keep boxes of sometimes a dozen of each AP model. This week, we're moving our "stock room" down the hall to a larger one because a tenant down the hall retired and emptied that office...I'll post a pic of our "Ubiquiti wall of glory!'

 

[NETWizz]

Suggestions:

Sell this customer a routed IPSec solution of some kind to link the homes with a virtual Wide-Area-Network. At the main site put a file share such as on a NAS and setup access to that from the other side, too.

Allow access to the cameras of both properties from both properties, etc. all under one control panel or portal if you will.

Stretch the VLAN for the cameras across the IPSec connection using l2tpv3 or more likely vxlan in the non-Cisco world to do layer-2 over layer-3 ultimately, you can make it work just like an 802.1q trunk.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'm moving him to 365 for his files/data.
Cameras are on a more modern system that utilizes a p2p secure cloud proxy, no port forwarding required.
As he grows I may do a "home office to lab office" VPN....as those are on the same ISP in town.
For his Bahamas house, he's on one of the smaller outer islands, not a good feeling about uptime or quality latency there for the tiny cable ISP. LTE for backup.

He sold his prior R&D company and is JUUUUST starting up this new one, so hopefully in a year or so....will turn into something good.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

One area of the new stockroom coming together...

 

[mikeroq]

One area of the new stockroom coming together...

View attachment 13592

Are those ThinkCentre AIO? I ask because all the ThinkCentre desktops I've bought over the lastseveral years never had a handle on top of the box like that.

My store room looks more like a empty cellar.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Are those ThinkCentre AIO? I ask because all the ThinkCentre desktops I've bought over the lastseveral years never had a handle on top of the box like that.

Boxes with handles are the ThinkCenter TIO 24 gen4 monitors...they have the dock in the back to accept the ThinkCenter Tiny PCs...like the M70q...those are the shorter Lenovo boxes on the third shelf from the bottom.

 

[mikeroq]

Boxes with handles are the ThinkCenter TIO 24 gen4 monitors...they have the dock in the back to accept the ThinkCenter Tiny PCs...like the M70q...those are the shorter Lenovo boxes on the third shelf from the bottom.

I only ever sold one of those. I like the concept of the monitor and computer being replaceable and not being stuck with an all in one with a broken screen or dead motherboard. I seen HP apparently is making a similar monitor for their tiny computers. Dell also appears to have a different take that snaps on to the back of the monitor stand.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I only ever sold one of those. I like the concept of the monitor and computer being replaceable and not being stuck with an all in one with a broken screen or dead motherboard. I seen HP apparently is making a similar monitor for their tiny computers. Dell also appears to have a different take that snaps on to the back of the monitor stand.

Our clients love 'em...I have a lot out there in service. These days, since SSDs took over spindles, really no need to take computers apart anymore for frequent service, which was a big drawback with earlier AIOs.

We also stock up on the Tiny Workstations, like the P340...that's what I'm typing from here. But we don't put them in the Tiny Monitors as much, they put out a bit of heat with those Quadro cards, and need the mini DP's from the Quadro instead of the built in DP of the Intel, so they can be finicky in the Tiny monitors.

 

[HCHTech]

I seen HP apparently is making a similar monitor for their tiny computers. Dell also appears to have a different take that snaps on to the back of the monitor stand.

Lenovo has the best implementation of this idea, IMO. The Dell system works, but there are too many wires, and the mounts are clunky. The Lenovo TIO answer is the cleanest looking, fewest wires, best-impression-of-you-to-a-client answer. Bundle them with the Lenovo Professional wireless keyboard/mouse combo and you'll never look back. The TIOs have been harder to get lately from D&H & Provantage, but that's our problem, not Lenovos. We need to open accounts with more distributors.