Topic: campus

[Gerald Jansen]

I have a situation that I need opinions on. I have a prospect that has 12 buildings. Each building has 24 units. Each units has two bedrooms. Each bedroom has a cat 5 RJ45 jack with a "home run" to the building phone closet. Question if I bring in a high speed connection to connect to the "cloud" and then put in a 100BT hub will an e-smith router handle the traffice of say 12 to 15 connections? Further, can each RJ45 station be isolated from the others? I see not reason it wouldn't work. However, I wanted to get a feel from some of you that may have already tried a similair situation.

TIA,

Jerry

[Joseph Morrison]

Hello Jerry,

> "home run" to the building phone closet. Question if
> I bring in a high speed connection to connect to the
> "cloud" and then put in a 100BT hub will an e-smith
> router handle the traffice of say 12 to 15 connections?

Yes, even our category 1 server configuration should handle this easily.

> Further, can each RJ45 station be isolated from the others?

If they're all plugged into the same hub, any machine in the building would be able to see network traffic from any other machine. (Similar to using a cablemodem - you can see your neighbor's traffic.) You'd have to warn people to be careful not to leave their network services enabled.

If you don't want this effect, I'm not sure what your options are. Perhaps there are some "smart hub/router" products available which can be configured for this sort of isolation?

Best regards,
- Joe

[Matt]

Not to detract from e-smith, but..

PublicPort (www.publicport.com) has a product that is in use in the apartment complex where I live.  This complex is wired to the nearby college's network.  PublicPort interfaces with Allied Telesyn, Cisco, or a few other brands of ethernet switches and allows you to have username/password authentication for users.  No port can see information from any other port.  

I'm not really endorsing them because I don't work for them or anything, but considering that I'm using it right now, it seems to work pretty good.  And, I work for the college IT department and they say that support is pretty good.

The drawback is that I believe their products are about $7000 - $10000 because its a whole piece of hardware.  Plus you need expensive switches, hubs won't work.

[Charlie Brady]

Gerald Jansen wrote:

> I have a situation that I need opinions on. I have a prospect
> that has 12 buildings. Each building has 24 units. Each units
> has two bedrooms. Each bedroom has a cat 5 RJ45 jack with a
> "home run" to the building phone closet. Question if
> I bring in a high speed connection to connect to the
> "cloud" and then put in a 100BT hub will an e-smith
> router handle the traffice of say 12 to 15 connections?
> Further, can each RJ45 station be isolated from the others? I
> see not reason it wouldn't work.

I would think that your situation might warrant more than a
single e-smith server.  Not just hardware, but in system design.
You will need to use switches rather than hubs if you wish to isolate each of the points from each other. It's also not clear to me whether you just wish to give web access to all these points, or whether you wish to provide file sharing and email for them as well. Remember that the e-smith server is a workgroup server/network appliance, not just an internet gateway.

[Gerald Jansen]

I envision one e-smith server in each building. No file sharing. All email would be handled by an ISP. The e-smith server would just be routing Internet access.