VLAN confusion
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@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
@black3dynamite said in VLAN confusion:
@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:
@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
Then you change your few static devices (if you do not have only a few static systems, you have other issues).
What JB means by this is - he uses static assignments in DHCP for things like printers. This allows you to reboot a printer to get the new settings when things like this change.
Servers are about the only thing that should be set statically, the rest can rely on Static DHCP assignment.
Domain Controller would pretty much be the only server that needs to be manually set to static.
Yeah but if DNS and/or DHCP went down, you will probably have trouble getting to your servers. Static IP's on all system critical servers seems like a better decision since they will function in almost any environment state.
Not unless you have a stupidly short lease time. I use 8 hour leases on most LAN stuff. Yeah it tries to renew every 4, but it will not require a DHCP server until 8 hours.
I set mine to three days.
Then you won't have a problem if the DHCP server is missing.
Are all the address leases synchronized to the same time or is do leases expire x amount of days after each individual host received it's address? If that's the case, there may be staggered renewals and I wouldn't know what system is going to expire when.. (I just realized I didn't know this)
You are correct that they happen randomly based on the machine that requested, but with a 3 day lease, the odds are low to be greatly impacted for any minor outage.
So if a couple of servers have leases that expire 10 minutes after my DHCP server goes down (DC dies or something) then that's going to be more systems down. I wouldn't want to risk it..
That 10 minutes would be almost impossible. That means it would have failed to renew DHCP dozens of times prior to dropping the lease. You have other problems if that is the case.
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@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
@black3dynamite said in VLAN confusion:
@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:
@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
Then you change your few static devices (if you do not have only a few static systems, you have other issues).
What JB means by this is - he uses static assignments in DHCP for things like printers. This allows you to reboot a printer to get the new settings when things like this change.
Servers are about the only thing that should be set statically, the rest can rely on Static DHCP assignment.
Domain Controller would pretty much be the only server that needs to be manually set to static.
Yeah but if DNS and/or DHCP went down, you will probably have trouble getting to your servers. Static IP's on all system critical servers seems like a better decision since they will function in almost any environment state.
How often does the DNS or DHCP server go down that this is something you worry about? What if your switch or LoB application server goes down? Then what???
Nothing should go down longer than the lease time. Restoring a DNS or DHCP server from backup is easily 30 minutes or less. Rebooting from doing updates is only a few minutes.
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@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
@black3dynamite said in VLAN confusion:
@dashrender said in VLAN confusion:
@jaredbusch said in VLAN confusion:
Then you change your few static devices (if you do not have only a few static systems, you have other issues).
What JB means by this is - he uses static assignments in DHCP for things like printers. This allows you to reboot a printer to get the new settings when things like this change.
Servers are about the only thing that should be set statically, the rest can rely on Static DHCP assignment.
Domain Controller would pretty much be the only server that needs to be manually set to static.
Yeah but if DNS and/or DHCP went down, you will probably have trouble getting to your servers. Static IP's on all system critical servers seems like a better decision since they will function in almost any environment state.
Not unless you have a stupidly short lease time. I use 8 hour leases on most LAN stuff. Yeah it tries to renew every 4, but it will not require a DHCP server until 8 hours.
I set mine to three days.
Then you won't have a problem if the DHCP server is missing.
Are all the address leases synchronized to the same time or is do leases expire x amount of days after each individual host received it's address? If that's the case, there may be staggered renewals and I wouldn't know what system is going to expire when.. (I just realized I didn't know this)
You are correct that they happen randomly based on the machine that requested, but with a 3 day lease, the odds are low to be greatly impacted for any minor outage.
So if a couple of servers have leases that expire 10 minutes after my DHCP server goes down (DC dies or something) then that's going to be more systems down. I wouldn't want to risk it..
A bit of perspective here...
First of all why would your DHCP server be down and not get failed over or restored quickly.
Next, all of your systems should be rebooted on a regular basis, so you will know quite firmly the status of your DHCP leases on the servers without even needing to check.
Finally, with a 3 day (72 hours) lease it is impossible for you to lose a DHCP address in less than 36 hours because all DHCP clients ask for a renew at 50% of lease time (or should). So your little doomsday scenario simply cannot happen.
I don't know, I was just saying like worst-case scenario, like if I was out of town on vacation and couldn't remote in or something. I do have two domain controllers but my second DHCP range is not active yet since I don't have enough free IP addresses. I was expecting to have our new phone system on a separate network and VLAN, which would free up addresses on the current config. I guess the alternative is to increase the size of my subnet, like we talked about earlier.
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It's a pretty disastrous scenario... all servers down, down for a long time, all clients losing leases... it's a scenario so bad that realistically, the DHCP would not be of concern should it happen. Not the kind of thing that is realistic to worry about. If something happened to this degree, and you were on vacation, they'd HAVE to get support for it regardless.
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Well, thanks everyone for all your input. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do regarding the VoIP situation, but I suppose I should read up about FreePBX or NTG or something...
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@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
Well, thanks everyone for all your input. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do regarding the VoIP situation, but I suppose I should read up about FreePBX or NTG or something...
Read up but you can also set one up on vultr for a few dollars a month.
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@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
Well, thanks everyone for all your input. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do regarding the VoIP situation, but I suppose I should read up about FreePBX or NTG or something...
Not a bad idea But to be clear, no one has specifically recommended any specific product or approach, just offered that Cisco is a terrible one, and getting a reseller instead of a consultant guarantees a bad result and it is clear that the reseller is trying to take advantage of the situation.
It's not that FreePBX or even NTG is the "right" answer. Is that you have a clearly bad answer arrived at through a clearly in appropriate business decision making process that lacks both business and IT oversights. So all of the checks and balances that should exist in a healthy business are being skipped.
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@coliver said in VLAN confusion:
@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
Well, thanks everyone for all your input. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do regarding the VoIP situation, but I suppose I should read up about FreePBX or NTG or something...
Read up but you can also set one up on vultr for a few dollars a month.
That's pretty big. For a few dollars you can know if a system works for you, instead of making a huge commitment to sales people with no need to deliver a working solution because you are already trapped.
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This thread is our top one of the whole month!
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@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:
@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
Well, thanks everyone for all your input. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do regarding the VoIP situation, but I suppose I should read up about FreePBX or NTG or something...
Not a bad idea But to be clear, no one has specifically recommended any specific product or approach, just offered that Cisco is a terrible one, and getting a reseller instead of a consultant guarantees a bad result and it is clear that the reseller is trying to take advantage of the situation.
It's not that FreePBX or even NTG is the "right" answer. Is that you have a clearly bad answer arrived at through a clearly in appropriate business decision making process that lacks both business and IT oversights. So all of the checks and balances that should exist in a healthy business are being skipped.
Well I asked my boss if I could check out alternative voice systems for comparison and he said it's my call... so it looks like I have the chance to do things the right way. That being said, I have no idea where to start. I looked at the NTG website and didn't find much valuable info, nor on the FreePBX site.. also, the vultr website looks like it has nothing to do with telephony and is instead a webhosting platform.. so I don't understand that...
Maybe I could give someone a call and go over some plans or something??
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Vultr is a standard cloud IaaS platform. Not related to web hosting in any way more or less than to telephony. Your PBX is just a server like any other. So your platforms for it would be the same as all of your other workloads.
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@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:
I looked at the NTG website and didn't find much valuable info....
$250 / mo. All inclusive hosted PBX. Bring your own trunks.
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What are you looking for from FreePBX? Other than a download link, which should be pretty clear, what more is there to find?