e-Net Fiber being pulled in

We decided to move the fiber from Dangan across town to Mervue and also, we're going to light our own dark fiber in Galway. It'll also more than double our bandwidth to Dublin.

The drop connection for that is finally being pulled today, pictures will follow.

The beauty of it all is, that no civils are needed, because we can pull it through existing ducting in the cable-riser of the neighbor building (owned by the same landlord). That way we're ensured, that we've got entirely different paths.

Obviously, this fiber trunk is also on a completely different fiber ring and connection to Dublin from the BT fiber, that already is in Mervue.

Cisco Catalyst

We've recently bought a couple of older Cisco Catalyst switches and replaced the Dell switches in the network.

First of all, the Cisco switches are more flexible and some of them even do Layer3 services, like BGP. So on top of the Catalyst 4006 for ExWest, we've got one of them in TeleCity and one in Mervue.

The changeover was done last week and things seem to be running pretty good. I'm just left with replacing the switches in remote sites like Abbeyknockmoy etc.

The reason for replacing the old switches is, that once in a while, when the VLan configuration is committed, the darn things just go daft and drop everything. All that is left then is to drive on site and powercycle the switch. Not something you really want to do, when the switch is 60-70 km's away.

Another switch that had to go is the Linksys Enterprise switch, because it's just a PAIN to having to find a Windows box, just to configure the Vlans. The switch's webinterface only works in IE and you can't configure Vlan's via SSH or telnet. How daft is that ?

Also our INEX Lan#2 peering are handed by the Catalyst in Dublin now. No major box needed there currently and we can upgrade as we go.

155 mbit/s link from Ballybaan to Abbeyknockmoy

The traffic volumes from Abbeyknockmoy are getting every day more difficult to cope with, without killing the latency. We're backhauling on 3 links into town now, to cope with the volume.

The fiber that is being installed by Smart will enable us with access to our own leased dark fiber from e-net, which will link Mervue to Ballybaan.

From there a licensed 7 GHz link at 30+ m on the old tower should enable us to get to Abbeyknockmoy and solve all of the bandwidth issues for a good while.

I've also got to figure out, what kind of kit we're going to use for the dark fiber. Initially our idea was CWDM gear, but that's way out of the budget currently. I've got a few other things that I'm looking at for the interim.

Cisco Catalyst Switch for ExWest

I've finally aquired a proper switch for Exchange West.

A Cisco Catalyst 4006 with a bunch of FE ports and a couple of GBIC ports will be serving as Internet Exchange in Galway until the demand for something bigger or better arises. Yes, this beast is EoL, next year even EoS, but honestly, the service is going to be free on 100 mbit/s ports and will come with no SLA and no option to buy transit across the exchange.

I've also sourced a SuperVisor III engine for the beast, so that it's running IOS, has a 64 Gbps switching fabric and will forward 48-Mpps in hardware for both Layer 2 and Layer 3/4 traffic.

I reckon' it'll be a good start platform.