Only one switch? Media drops between the printer and server only?

Sounds less like bad cabling and such and more like someone broadcasting garbage onto the network. Perhaps too many devices running Bonjour or something like it clogging up broadcast.

@Reid-Cooper said:

I agree, it sounds like the Mac has a "sideband" conversation with the printer not going through the same channel as the Windows machines. So when the Windows machines have a hiccup through that channel the Mac has no idea that anything is wrong.

Bonjour is a routeless protocol, like IPX or NetBEUI. Discovery works through IP but it broadcasts instead of point to point. So it can work on non-routeable IP addresses like 169.254. I would bet a buck that the Mac and printer are on the same switch.

Other than cleaning up cabling and replacing crap switches, not much to do.

Or, if you are so inclined, go with a host entry for the local site and change to external DNS.

Remember, you are in corporate now, this kind of crap usually gets flagged by security pretty easy. Especially if you are attempting to circumvent the transparent content filter.

What you need is a proxy.

Set up one using ssh.

http://ha.ckers.org/ssh_proxy.html

@thanksaj said:

Getting ready to go out and hang out with @dengelhardt and maybe @PSX_Defector but PSX didn't confirm.

I'm busy tonight. Grow ever so jealous of my massive VMware clusters!

What you want is a deeper baffle, that should eat most of the sound right up. Eggcrate stuff will get most of the random sound out of the way, actual performance would take something more.

http://www.foambymail.com/AW4/acoustical-4-wedge-foam.html

Assuming they play in the garage, just foam up the wall next to the house. If they are playing in a corner of the house, foam up the interior walls. And if it's all over the place, foam up your office.

@thanksaj said:

@Hubtech , the thing I'd need to soundproot would be the ceiling, and I don't have the equipment or money to do it right now. Besides, because Texas seems to love the popcorn ceilings, and don't just use textured ceilings, or ceilings with sand paint, like they do in the North, it makes attaching anything to them even more difficult.

http://www.foambymail.com/acoustical-eggcrate-foam.html

Your welcome.

@thanksaj said:

He was talking about how this one printer was throwing "lots of dirty traffic", although I'm not entirely sure even he knew what he meant by that.

When you have a device sending lots of chatty packets out for no reason, e.g. pinging broadcast when not necessary or pulling DHCP info at inappropriate times. For example, the original iPhone had lots of problems with 802.11b traffic, causing access points to go nuts due to their incessant chatter. I read of a few colleges just out right banning Apple MACs from accessing the point due to their excessive nature.

But the solution for a dirty device on a LAN isn't to VLAN it out but to get rid of the device.

Sounds like you work with some real "winners".

@technobabble said:

I was thinking if I got the Synology Disk Station DS214se I could use it with JBOD instead of RAID.

One drive could be the shared drive and the other drive could be the backup drive.

Would that work or do I just need 2 devices?

One of the things I like about the QNAP I got is that I can hook up a USB drive to it and have it run backups of the stuff straight to it. And since it will write to NTFS, if your device blows up, you won't have to be running around trying to figure out how to mount an EXT4 drive to a Windows machine. That's one of the problems with these NAS devices, is getting it to play nice nice with Windows if/when you have a failure and have to raw handle the drive. On any modern Linux distro, no prob. But if you are asking this, odds are you are probably more Windows oriented.

Assuming not big data, e.g. database writes, just about anything will do to be honest. It's only a few machines, not the entire enterprise. That's why we can stick with cheap. Hell, a big giant workstation running Windows would suffice.

One of the main reasons I was thinking Cisco was due to the ability to get in SFPs to hook into anything I needed. Core switches, straight fiber into my servers, who knows what I could do.

The Mikrotik gear has multiple SFPs plus switching gear to handle anything. So jacking into my Cisco gear over fiber is a snap, or I can go up to 10G and get real hard core.

One of these:

http://routerboard.com/CCR1009-8G-1S

And one of these:

http://routerboard.com/CRS125-24G-1S-2HnD-IN

I can run anything at that setup, it will never choke on bandwidth. Time to whip out the AMEX, I've got a purchase to make.

I actually totally forgot about a product I've used in my past, which will easily handle that amount of bandwidth, has a great firewall, can handle multiple pipes like a champ and is cheap to boot!

http://www.mikrotik.com/

Used to use this equipment back in the old days when a Cisco router would cost you both your left nut and your first born. We used to use them for various ISP functions, mostly as core routers or ATM concentrators. People use it now for it's wireless management, lots of WISPs are on the gear.

Not as sexy and cool as Cisco UCSes sitting in my closet, but certainly wouldn't cost me as much as my truck.

@thanksaj said:

@PSX_Defector said:

Oh, and I still should take someone down to the Hell House.

http://darkrailhellhouse.com/

It's HI-larious!

WTH is it?

Just as it sounds. They tell everyone that they are going to hell because reasons. They put on a rather gruesome show too, with abortions and gay sex and all kinds of things.

It's a fun time for all, bring yo kids, bring yo wife, because they got the LAWRD on their side!

@scottalanmiller said:

You assume that QNAP loses customers because of support issues. But they are a consumer class company that a lot of SMBs buy because they are cheap.

Their prices are pretty much in line with all the same levels of equipment out there in that category. If we want enterprise level support, we should be buying enterprise equipment. But we have to balance what is needed versus what we want. A store that someone is gonna have two boxes accessing doesn't require an Equalogic or NetApp.

Support for this category of device should be considered, but it's not even close to what we can get from any proper vendor. But no vendor is gonna deal with US customers in only Mandarin. Not even those cheap knockoff resellers of eyePhonee's only deal in Mandarin.

@scottalanmiller said:

@PSX_Defector said:

QNAP is saying that warranty work is supposed to go through the vendor/authorized reseller. And even if you use them for service, you are paying full freight either way. I've never known a vendor who wouldn't do an advanced RMA anyways, so if it popped on Friday, it would be on the next slow boat from China on Monday.

I can get a Netgear replacement in Dallas in 2-3 hours.

From Ingram Micro. Who is a QNAP reseller.

It's high time to move up in the world. With my 100Mbps circuit from TWC and AT&T's 25Mbps circuit which should be bumping up to 1Gbps, if my contacts at the Death Star are to believed, my equipment has reached it's limit.

I had this happen a few years ago with my old Peplink. I bonded two 3Mbps DSL pipes and a single 10Mbps TWC pipe, found out the hard way that Peplink has a 15Mbps speed limit. My RV042 is better, but still not close to handling all I got now. With the old 50Mbps TWC pipe it worked just fine.

So decision time, and where to buy. Anyone know some equipment that will support over 2Gbps over ethernet, has good load balancing protocols, and won't cost me my left nut? I'm thinking Cisco's 1800/1900 with an ASA, but that's gonna cost me big. The Junipers at that level ain't cheap. Fortigate's have less than stellar load balancing. To get performance out of Vyatta I would have to go community, and a dual ethernet card aint cheap at $400 or so plus finding a chassis I can get all the equipment into. pfSense would do it, but again, same issue as Vyatta, equipment is hard to source and not cheap for what I need. And if I wanted to go back to Peplink, it would cost me $4K.

I'm almost tempted to just go big and buy a Cisco UCS with all the modules I will ever need. Who else would have one of those in their home?

@scottalanmiller said:

It's the support that is the problem. QNAP if you read their full SLA is "you'll get a new box, two weeks after you send us your old one." For home, that's fine. For a business, it's bad. Stick to the business class devices unless you plan to buy a second just to have on hand to do the job while the first one is in its two weeks hiatus.

I don't see where you see that.

http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?lang=en&sn=855

QNAP is saying that warranty work is supposed to go through the vendor/authorized reseller. And even if you use them for service, you are paying full freight either way. I've never known a vendor who wouldn't do an advanced RMA anyways, so if it popped on Friday, it would be on the next slow boat from China on Monday.

And getting support is reportedly nearly impossible. @John-Nicholson has had a terrible time getting any support on them and what he got had to be done in Mandarin - which most of us lack as a support option.

Huh? That don't make sense. Even when I had to get support from Peplink, a very Chinese company, it was always in English. Anyone NOT doing business in English will find themselves without customers.

If the load is pretty low, I would say try this.

http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?sn=822&c=351&sc=514&t=522&n=18376

I just bought one for myself, popped in four 2TB hard drives. It supports iSCSI, NFS, SMB, LMNOP, BBQ and WTF. Even one of the two drive boxes would do you good, supports the same protocols.

@scottalanmiller said:

at ten users AD is normally overkill

That's why we have Samba. And, with Samba 4, you should be able to integrate the box into O365's AD structure. SSO anyone?

Oh, and I still should take someone down to the Hell House.

http://darkrailhellhouse.com/

It's HI-larious!

@Huw3481 said:

then I'm on the Highway to Hell.

Well, there are no stop signs or speed limits.