Tower Upgrade

[Rory]

We decided to upgrade one of our towers. There was a need for three 8 port Tough Switches due to the number of access points. Installing a 24 Port Wisp Switch allowed us to clean up the wiring a bit as well as condense the equipment in regards to rack space.

Before

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After

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We managed to not only clean things up by not having as many inter-switch connections, but we aggregated three gig ports between the router and switch and used that group as a single trunk carrying all the local Vlans. We were also able to remove the 48v power supplies that we had wire tied to the enclosure, which was honestly the best option I could think of at the time. Overall I think it has a more clean look now than before.

I'm working on a mockup of the config I used for the Cisco router as well as the switch. I'm currently auditing our DNS server, once I am finished I plan on completing it and adding it to the post.

[sirhc]

This is how this tower was setup.

With the WISP Switch you can create a Static aggregation trunk between the router and the switch. In this case
three 1 GB ports are aggregated together to create a 3 GB trunk between the switch and the router.

Then each WISP Switch port basically becomes a virtual interface of the router allowing you to power ALL your radios
from one switch through VLANs.

In the pictures below you can see the interface of the WISP Switch and how it is bonded to the router.

You can set up the switch to do your ping watch dog to ALL your radios including your airFIBER radios and auto
power cycle them if needed or you can do it manually with the UI or CLI.

Also on one interface you can if there are any errors on any ports at a glance.

Also the WISP Switch boots in 17 seconds and if you reboot the switch or do a firmware upgrade it does not un
power the ports leaving the radios up while the switch reboots. This greatly reduces tower down time becuase if
your switch takes a couple minutes to boot then brings up your AP's they have to boot and then advertise and then
associate their client radios then your tower is back up.

Even if the EdgeSwitch did power the airFIBER now your airFIBER has to boot which takes a couple minutes then it
has to establish a link then start passing traffic.

Now granted you normally do not upgrade your firmware or reboot your switch that often but if you do you know
how long it takes. And if your AP's are using DFS then it takes even longer. Personally I like 17 seconds!

Now if I was putting a switch in an office and wanted 802.3af/t to power phones and such the WISP Switch does not
support that and an EdgeSwitch is a much better choice/solution.

But for a tower it depends on what you want to do. But if you have to also buy the Power Switch to remote reboot
your airFIBER or other backhaul radios you are piling on extra costs and yet another interface to have to check and
or log into.

CLICK ON IMAGES BELOW TO MAKE FULL SIZE

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[adairw]

looks awesome. love the setup.
Do you have anyone using LAG to a Mikrotik? Personally never tried it but probably will very soon as I'm testing some different configurations.

[Rory]

With the mikrotik you may be able to use LACP as well as static aggregation. In the cisco world you don't see lacp on anything other than switches until you get well above our budget. I would definitely investigate what aggregation methods are available on your platform.