Webs’ Random Ideas

So I have been working on some Cisco 871 wireless routers at work lately and I must say I am really impressed. Basically these devices can act as your regular run of the mill wireless router with a 4 port built in switch, but that would be a waste of some dollars as these devices pack a whole ton of features.

The way I am running it is I have an 871 connected to a “head-end” router back at work. The 871 creates a VPN tunnel out of my home network to the head-end router. The nice thing is this tunnel is dynamically created so you can essentially take this 871 anywhere, hook it up, and have a connection to work.

Now the fun part is once you have this connection, not only can you have wired and wireless connections, but you can use these connections to get IP Phone, teleconferencing, and video services all across the VPN tunnel back to work. And with pretty amazing speed and little overhead.

I have a IP phone, an IP wireless phone (a phone that wirelessly connects to the 871 and then acts as a IP phone once the connection is made), and a webcam. I haven’t tested the webcam yet, and will report on it once I have, but everything else works pretty damn smooth. I have run into some problems with the wireless IP phones, but that is because we are using the new “dual mode” phones that can make voice calls on cellular and wireless networks. They are still in first generation and just coming out with the newer second generation ones which should hopefully solve the problem.

I have been beyond impressed with the capabilities of the 871 and I hope to have subsequent posts on more technical topics like 802.1x port authentication… Oh boy!

and the damn Guest Wireless Controller finally works. Since Thursday at 9:00P I worked nearly a weeks worth of work hours trying to fix guest wireless at my company. After getting Cisco on the phone it was finally solved. I will try to write more later, because it’s an issue others could easily run into.

Cisco Building Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks… yea, I’m such a nub at this stuff I had to cheat and look up the title for the class there

But the good thing is when you don’t know much about topic “X” and your company sends you to training on topic “X” you tend to learn a TON about topic “X”. So I’m learning a lot and happy with how much I have remembered from class 3-4 years ago. The key though to anything networking is subnetting!!! Without that I would be completely screwed.