Week 3 Posting – Networking
Someone asked me to build a webpage on what I have done from my A+ Class and so I put together this page. How To: Setup a Garage LAN (tekrp.com) As I was building the page, the decision was made to just stream the activity and see what people might say that join in the chat and take a look at the page. The first person’s comment was, “I thought you just put a switch down for everyone to connect to and said you knew it all.” I’m not sure where that impression came from but indeed when my kids first asked for me to build them a Minecraft Server, that is how I started when I ran out of ports on the back of the router. Yes, I went to best buy and grabbed a 16 ethernet port gigabit unmanaged switch and connected it all together. That is where issues began, that is when I started learning. Do you really think I wanted to keep listening to teenagers complaining about lag to the Minecraft server that was 10 feet away from them?! There isn’t enough Advil on the shelf at Walmart to contain that kind of generated pain. Spending hours and hours researching how to make things better, changes were made.
Load Balancers, Firewalls, Managed Switches (Layer 2, 3+), cat-5e cable were all purchased but there were no manuals on how to set this up. From here it was literally going into the setup menus and googling every acronym and term I could find and research what it was. Do I remember it all now, no, but am I familiar with it to know how to google it, yes. But that was all old technology, once it was all connected correctly, the kids were happy, the garage was saved and the shelves were restocked with Advil once again!
This lasted maybe a month before someone asked, “Hey, if you can host a Minecraft server, can you host anything else?” and back to the store I went to buy more Advil. This time it was setting up game servers that could take traffic from the LAN and the WAN not just a simple single Minecraft server. Building a network to handle the traffic of the LAN and WAN while building servers to handle the traffic, adding Comcast only giving me 35Mbps upload / 250 Mbps download, this was going to be a challenge.
The decision was to build a 10Gbps network with Cat-6a. We had RJ-45 connectors at the cable ends but at the patch panels we only had punch down blocks available and I believe we went with the Type-A not Type-B configuration. NIC’s for the Type 1 hypervisors running VMWare ESXi 6.7 were dual 10Gbps NIC’s by Intel. The Supermicro motherboards also had 3 10Gbps NICs one for web access to the BIOS and the other two for network traffic. Once we had that down, the gateway was put into bridge mode with the Meraki 67 Router, NAT was configured for the static IP’s, all Wi-Fi disabled and traffic from the Meraki went to an 8 port 10Gbps switch that I called my Distribution Switch. Eventually it was removed and I realized it was just better to work with as few switches as possible to eliminate as many hops as possible. Initially packet storm was a thing and while all systems were running phenomenally, no one could connect or it would take minutes to connect instead of the blink of an eye. This required more Advil as I had no idea what was going on, this wasn’t in anything I had read yet.
Doing more research into each acronym of networking, looping came up and packet storm along with DDoSing. Spending a whole week waking up to do more configurations ended me with learning about VLAN’s. Setting up VLAN’s solved a lot of my problems along with setting up a LAG between the switches utilizing LACP. The PC’s used 1Gbps NIC’s, connected via Cat-6a to a 10Gbps switch. The servers were on a separate switch / VLAN, they used 10Gbps NIC’s and connected to a 10Gbps switch. Both switches were connected together with dual CAT-6a cables to form the LAG and used the LACP to transmit data to each other, essentially creating a 20Gbps bus. Our Network screamed with speed! But Comcast stood firm on 35up/250down with no hopes in sight for fiber.
Thus the story ends with a bottle neck from the ISP.
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