Home and Office connection, Tunnel, new Switches and Routers

[Stephan Daum]

Hi SNB Family,

i am new to SNB Forums and already have a couple of questions for your ideas regarding my Home-Network and Office-Network connection. In the picture below you can see how both networks should look like. In both networks are routers that organise the network via simple DHCP. No DNS or anything else.

Home Connection is 125mbit/12,5mbit cable (same Provider as Office)
Office Connection is 75mbit/15mbit cable (same Provider as Home)

Home Router (10) at home is a Linksys EA6400 with Linksys Firmware.
Office Router (21) is an ASUS RT16N running WRT.
Office Switch (20) is now a Smart-Managed TP-Link TL-SG2210P and some clients are connected on the router because the TP-Link has only 8 Ports.
Home Switch (9) is some cheap D-Link crap.

What i need is:
Both networks can contact each client of each side with reasonable speed. Specially the Sip Home Phones (6) and (7) must be able to communicate and be connected with the Office PBX (19). Internet traffic should not be routed through the tunnel but through the internet connection at each point.
Office Sip Phones (12) (16) should be powered by POE
Qnap in Office should be connected with BOTH NICs with port-trunking.
iPhones and macbooks should be able to connect to each network with OpenVPN or L2TP.

What i guess:
Changing both Routers (10) (21) with VPN capable Routers should work. But wich devices should i choose for my needs?
I should replace the Home Switch (9) with the office switch (20) and install a TP Tl-SG10 (not sure if 802.3ad is supported) or Netgear FS728TLP switch in the office
I should use dedicated WiFi-Access Points instead of using the inbuild Access Points of the routers. Maybe ubiquity APs.

Do you guys have some suggestions what devices i should use? Specially with the routers i have problems to find what i need.

I hope you can help me choosing new routers, new switche(s) and maybe APs?

best regards
Steve

 

[coxhaus]

I would say the biggest decision on equipment is both the home and office in the same location? I could not tell.

IF the home and office are in the same location then I would use a switch instead of multiple routers. Switches are faster and built for local network traffic. I would use a layer 3 switch and divide the home and office in separate VLANs. I probably would split the phones off also. You should be able to share printers, scanners and things across networks and still maintain separate networks. I would buy access points which will support multiple VLANs so you only need one set of wireless access points. You can run a default VLAN for equipment only separate from the home and office networks.

 

[Stephan Daum]

THX for your reply.

Office and home are in different locations within the same city. I will now connect another SG2210P to the existing SG2210P (21) with two patchcables and trunk the ports with 802.3ad. The second switch will now serve the slower clients (printers, SIP-Phones, PBX) while the first switch will connect to the faster QNAP with 802.3ad and to the Apple machines.

Now i have to decide what routers to buy. I am interested in the Cisco RV042G since the testet VPN bandwidth of those is about 40-60mbit what is enough for my connection 12,5 up at home and 15mbit up in the office). Another idea is a OpenVPN appliance as virtual machine in the Qnaps.

If you have some suggestions for the VPN connection i would be thankful if you could tell me those.

 

[Mokers]

I haven't set this up using that specific hardware, but with the way you are setting it up should be fine. You set up the tunnel and identify each network as part of the same zone and the routers should route only the LAN traffic over the tunnel while internet traffic goes to the internet through the gateway.

Similarly for the client VPNs, you should be able to set it up so a client connecting to either gateway will have access to both networks.

I would probably suggest running DNS on the QNAP in each office. If you create a custom DNS zone, it gives you some flexibility with how you are going to layout the network overall.

What is the work going on inside the office? This makes a difference when judging how much improvement you will get with link aggregation.

Are the QNAPs just storage? How often will somebody in one office need to access the storage in the other office?

For recommendations, this is always complicated because it depends on what you are comfortable with. What do you consider your networking experience? How technical are you? Are you OK with consumer equipment or would you leaning towards more SOHO / small business options? How much time do you want to spend fixing the network? Most of what you are looking for can be done with a entry level SMB router and an entry level managed switch.

As for VLAN setup, you usually reserve VLAN 1 for management. I would then add a few more VLANs. Public VLAN, Phone VLAN and office VLAN. Depending on how often you need to use the phones, you may

 

[Samir]

I think your ideas of using ipsec vpn tunnels is spot-on. And the rv-series should be able to do what you want. Just keep in mind that ipsec vpn configuration can be tedious so don't be too disheartened if you can't get a ping across your tunnel on the first try.