OpenMoko Taipei office network setup
For the last three days I've been busy setting up the network in the new OpenMoko office. Finally something that just works, without any major flaws. That's probably because the involvement of external entities is fairly small. But looking at it closer, actually exactly there the problems start. FIC purchasing e.g. only bought 50% of the switch equipment that I asked for, something that I still don't yet have received any details about, neither some kind of apology.
In any case, the network is up and running. We now have a pretty uncommon heterogeneous combination of Cisco, Dell and even some D-Link switches, with the core switch being a pretty impressive Dell 6248. The 10GBit transceivers are still missing, so the backbone is just running 1GBit for the time being.
There's a total of about 190 Ethernet access ports throughout this new office, and we have various different broadcast domains, safely separating guest network, office network, r&d network, ... from each other.
The server room also looks quite nice now, with five 19" full-height 19" racks, 2 layers of UPS (building-wide and extra small UPS in front of servers), with three fairly big servers in operation, and eight more pending to be used soon.
The Internet uplink is a 100MBit capable physical layer (fiber optics), of which we only subscribed to 8MBit initially. But one phone call (plus additional transfer of money) later, we can bump the speed to any rate below that 100MBit physical layer limit.
The operation of our own (netfilter/iptables based, what did you think?) firewall now also brings us back the long-missed basic fundamental networking needs of any free software hackers (called luxury around here) of all our developers being able to
- access the web without restrictions and blocked sites
- finally use IRC!
- access external IMAP4 servers
- have SSH and other interactive sessions not time out every couple of minutes