Fixing a Small Business Network

[System Error Message]

Yes you can. Since 802.11n, speeds are generally more than adequate and can scale out well to general business users just fine. In our environment the only people who are hard wired are IT and Engineering people who move lots of large datasets. Otherwise we have thousands of active WiFi clients....corporate devices and BYOD. All a matter of proper distribution of APs with proper configuration.

Not quite. When you implement wifi you must ask yourself this, what is the price of downtime, does it mean loss of money? If the answer to this is yes, then use wires. If you are paying people, a downtime will be costly, hence why i wouldnt choose wifi unless it was a temporary setup. The other thing is the density, everyone has a smartphone nowadays, and it uses wifi, so it helps to reduce wifi as many apps like to use the internet and bombard people with updates and notifications. Windows update is another reason not to use wifi.

Only the most minimalistic or temporary setups can have wifi only as an option or if you are not allowed to put wires (you are renting for example and they dont allow) where adding wires can be a hazard or go into whats not allowed.

 

[coxhaus]

I believe Wi-Fi is for mobile devices.

 

[MichaelCG]

Not quite. When you implement wifi you must ask yourself this, what is the price of downtime, does it mean loss of money? If the answer to this is yes, then use wires. If you are paying people, a downtime will be costly, hence why i wouldnt choose wifi unless it was a temporary setup. The other thing is the density, everyone has a smartphone nowadays, and it uses wifi, so it helps to reduce wifi as many apps like to use the internet and bombard people with updates and notifications. Windows update is another reason not to use wifi.

Only the most minimalistic or temporary setups can have wifi only as an option or if you are not allowed to put wires (you are renting for example and they dont allow) where adding wires can be a hazard or go into whats not allowed.

Amazing that our 25k+ user company survives with WiFi then. To note...the majority of users have the option to plug-in if they wish...just most don't bother for daily tasks. I am not on the client side of the house, but the last stats I got from our desktop team was that we are roughly 50% laptops in most locations. Really not sure how downtime comes into play here...when built correctly, WiFi reliability can be nearly the same as wired. Keep in mind most of our facilities are not shared and are not near other facilities that will introduce additional interference to deal with. I am a security guy by trade so I will always prefer hard wire over wireless any day of the week, but stating that you cannot build out WiFi for normal daily business use is just not true anymore. I work from home so I am not a typical office worker, but over the last 3 years when I am in the office (6-10 times per year) I have not cabled my laptop. I have only used the Enterprise WiFi. As for Windows update?? WiFi or wired....my laptop gets patched over the VPN so I have bigger reliability and performance problems when it comes to that.

Is wired generally overall more reliable and consistent than WiFi? Absolutely.
Can WiFi be built out in a reliable manner? Absolutely....although performance will be dictated by your local RF environment. If you are in a dirty RF environment, then there is no way WiFi is going to be a great option.

When you have a user population that is heavy on laptops and the ability to move from office to office, having a functional and reliable WiFi environment becomes critical to business. If our WiFi is down, we are losing money. Our warehouses can't ship product, the production facilities can't order parts, and IT is just annoyed because we now have to find a cable to plug-in our laptops.

 

[System Error Message]

Amazing that our 25k+ user company survives with WiFi then. To note...the majority of users have the option to plug-in if they wish...just most don't bother for daily tasks. I am not on the client side of the house, but the last stats I got from our desktop team was that we are roughly 50% laptops in most locations. Really not sure how downtime comes into play here...when built correctly, WiFi reliability can be nearly the same as wired. Keep in mind most of our facilities are not shared and are not near other facilities that will introduce additional interference to deal with. I am a security guy by trade so I will always prefer hard wire over wireless any day of the week, but stating that you cannot build out WiFi for normal daily business use is just not true anymore. I work from home so I am not a typical office worker, but over the last 3 years when I am in the office (6-10 times per year) I have not cabled my laptop. I have only used the Enterprise WiFi. As for Windows update?? WiFi or wired....my laptop gets patched over the VPN so I have bigger reliability and performance problems when it comes to that.

Is wired generally overall more reliable and consistent than WiFi? Absolutely.
Can WiFi be built out in a reliable manner? Absolutely....although performance will be dictated by your local RF environment. If you are in a dirty RF environment, then there is no way WiFi is going to be a great option.

When you have a user population that is heavy on laptops and the ability to move from office to office, having a functional and reliable WiFi environment becomes critical to business. If our WiFi is down, we are losing money. Our warehouses can't ship product, the production facilities can't order parts, and IT is just annoyed because we now have to find a cable to plug-in our laptops.

i was talking about desktops rather than laptops. Thing is, most setups tend to be desktop heavy. The exception of wifi with laptops would be a hospital, though hospitals have wifi too but you wouldnt want much in treatment rooms, so a laptop thats carted into it with a bunch of equipment would be entirely hard wired to the network instead.

You need both wired and wifi and combining both can actually do a lot, but a lot either use only one and dont configure wifi.

Still though, i wouldnt rely on wifi, use wired where possible. One cool setups a lot of large buildings use are a strip of power plugs and ethernets per room allowing for you to plug in rather than having to rely on wifi. One reason i say this is because of how much bandwidth is used when doing a particular work. 2.4Ghz wifi N has at best 30% practical bandwidth, while 5 Ghz wifi AC gets about 50% practical bandwidth from the link speed in many environments, this is something to consider as well. Latency wise, as wifi gets loaded it increases significantly.

 

[sfx2000]

I believe Wi-Fi is for mobile devices.

Considering the industry you shared earlier - I agree, wired is less headaches...

 

[coxhaus]

Ok on one side of the building I have picked up an occasional lag. I have six i7 CPU 3.9 PCs plugged into 1 D-Link 8 port switch feeding a larger Cisco core switch. I am thinking of dividing the PCs into 2 D-Link switches so there will be 2 wires back to the core switch. I can't install individual drops yet as I need to wait for more money.

 

[MichaelCG]

Ok on one side of the building I have picked up an occasional lag. I have six i7 CPU 3.9 PCs plugged into 1 D-Link 8 port switch feeding a larger Cisco core switch. I am thinking of dividing the PCs into 2 D-Link switches so there will be 2 wires back to the core switch. I can't install individual drops yet as I need to wait for more money.

Can you hit the Cisco switch via SNMP to monitor actual usage? Just to see/confirm if you have errors on the line or if the uplink is actually saturated.

 

[sfx2000]

Ok on one side of the building I have picked up an occasional lag. I have six i7 CPU 3.9 PCs plugged into 1 D-Link 8 port switch feeding a larger Cisco core switch. I am thinking of dividing the PCs into 2 D-Link switches so there will be 2 wires back to the core switch. I can't install individual drops yet as I need to wait for more money.

You didn't mention if the Cisco core switch was managed or not - if yes, then port stats should suggest the right course...

Most of the current unmanaged desktop gigabit switches (such as the DLinks) are non-blocking these day, more than enough aggregate bandwidth on the SoC inside...

 

[MichaelCG]

....use wired where possible.

This we will always agree on.

 

[sfx2000]

Can you hit the Cisco switch via SNMP to monitor actual usage? Just to see/confirm if you have errors on the line or if the uplink is actually saturated.

You and I are thinking the same thing

 

[coxhaus]

No. The core switch is one of the old Cisco small business GIG 16 port switches which is not managed.

What could I use to read the SNMP that is easy if I changed the switch? We had Cisco software at my old work that was not cheap and was a full time job for one person to keep up with the Cisco hardware.

Do you think I am starting to hit the head on Spectrum's 200/10 bandwidth? I have a bunch of those Inetl i7 CPU 3.9 PCs. They are all working in the cloud. This is a problem I see with working in the cloud.

I don't think there are errors as the upload CAT5e cable between the core and D-Link was just replaced by me from Fry's a month ago. The issue has started since the addition of the last 5 PCs. This up-link is hit harder than the others as there are more people on this one switch than the others. The other switches only have about 3 PCs per switch.

 

[sfx2000]

If you're hitting WAN limits, something to consider...

Can always enable SNMP on the RV320 - info here

https://community.cisco.com/t5/smal...ement-protocol-snmp-on-rv320-and/ta-p/3170431

And then use PRTG as a logger/analyzer - runs on Windows...

https://www.paessler.com/prtg

 

[MichaelCG]

Agree with sfx2000 on this...get PRTG running and enable SNMP on your router since your switches are all unmanaged. At least see if you can determine your circuit is pegging out. Working in the cloud doesn't always translate to high bandwidth consumption....depending on what you are doing of course. General office work like the Google suite or o365 won't usually use lots of bandwidth unless transferring large files and/or attachments.

And adding another cheap unmanaged switch isn't a huge issue....those are pretty darn cheap. Just may not solve the issue.

 

[coxhaus]

PRTG looks involved. Are you guys running PRTG? Can you load it on a laptop for occasional use?

I have Cisco Findit loaded for tracking firmware. Trying to use it to tie to SNMP gets expensive. You can use a raspberry pie as a probe.

No office365, they use real estate products which are pictures, diagrams and some online busy work. Most of the work is pictures and floor layouts.

I know there are MIBs available for the Cisco switches and routers.

 

[MichaelCG]

If they are uploading a bunch of stuff, it won't take much to saturate a 10Mbps upstream link.

I haven't personally run PRTG in many many many years...I have a linux box at the house running Cacti that handles my SNMP reporting duties. However the last time I looked at the website, PRTG was pretty much point and click. When getting basic interface stats, it shouldn't be anymore than configuring SNMP on the router, adding a device in PRTG with the correct IP and community string and let it rip.

 

[sfx2000]

Agree with sfx2000 on this...get PRTG running and enable SNMP on your router since your switches are all unmanaged. At least see if you can determine your circuit is pegging out. Working in the cloud doesn't always translate to high bandwidth consumption....depending on what you are doing of course. General office work like the Google suite or o365 won't usually use lots of bandwidth unless transferring large files and/or attachments.

And adding another cheap unmanaged switch isn't a huge issue....those are pretty darn cheap. Just may not solve the issue.

@coxhaus - Windows also has SNMP support directly, so no agent needed... so one can also get visibility in to the clients, as long as the 'feature' is installed on the client.

PRTG, along with other network monitoring platforms, does involved a bit of effort and planning - but there's a good benefit to seeing what's going on with the network there.

I'm not a big fan of PRTG directly - because Windows - but it's a capable platform... cacti and others are interesting if you want to dig deeper...

 

[coxhaus]

If they are uploading a bunch of stuff, it won't take much to saturate a 10Mbps upstream link.

I think you mean 1000Mbps....right? I get it 200/10. The lag seems to be when clicking on pictures it takes a few milliseconds to respond only some times.

I may try to download to PRTG to an old laptop.

 

[MichaelCG]

A few milliseconds to respond or just slowly downloads the image? If an actual delay, I would be checking your DNS settings more so than your bandwidth consumption.

 

[coxhaus]

It is a pause (lag). Tha'ts why I thought is was a switch squeezing down through one up link. The image happens fast it sometimes has a pause when you click.

This is on one of the first original machines installed. This only started after adding more machines.

 

[coxhaus]

I may try to disable IPv6 on the PCs since we are not using it. I will if it helps with lag.