Wednesday, September 26, 2018

SPF to RJ45 WAN Network question

Hello,

Our office is moving very soon to a new location, and since I have been the one with the most networking experience, the whole issue has been moved to me.

Now I have ordered us some router & switches that are user-friendly enough that if I ever need to pass it on, they don't need a cisco cert to understand the basics. In light of this, I ordered Cisco Meraki MX84 & 2x MS210.

Since the new building owner also doesn't provide any Internet connection, I was left out shopping for this as well. Now long story short, we found a well priced ISP and they provided us with a neat set of static IPs and hooked us up to wide Internet.

Now, this is where the issue comes in.

The email I got from the ISP said the following: "we have connected the fibre and added an SFP 10GBASE to the line". This is pretty cool, until it hit me, the MX84 has SFP ports, but they can't be used for WAN, the WAN port is RJ45 only.

The SFP device is the following: https://imgur.com/a/xKvrFTL - which is an SFP or SFP+ device? This confuses me, as I'm finding it hard to find any information if there's actually any physical difference between the those plugs.

So, given a nice little headache and me going back to thinking about how I can solve this. In comes my idea of "Fuck this, we're moving soon, I'll deal with the overhead later".

Option 1)

Plug the SFP plug into the switch SFP port (49) put that port on VLAN ACCESS 666, wire copper (CAT6A) from port 48 (VLAN TRUNK 666) to the router WAN port. WAN on the router is set to one of our static IPs, and VLAN 666.

Disadvantage: we run from switch back to router, to go eventually back to switch to the clients.

Option 2)

Plug the SFP plug into the router SFP port (11) put that on VLAN ACCESS 666 and assign it a static IP address from one of the subnet which we received, run a copper cable from one of the router's RJ45 ports to the WAN input, putting that port in trunk 666.

Disadvantage: we're already losing 1 static IP just to give that SFP port an IP.

Option 3)

Call some store, order at the speed of lighting a media converter.

Disadvantage: it's ugly, it costs more money, it might not arrive in time (putting 50 developers without Internet for a few days)...

I'm inclined to go for option 1 as we have the overhead on that solution: ISP -> Switch -> Router -> Switch -> Client, but at least we're not losing anything (static IPs, money on media converters, ...)

Finally, this link is 5 Gbps which was ordered from the ISP, and our devices can currently (we're adding more devices later on) only handle 1Gbit SFP, will this be an issue as well? If it is, all my solutions are void and I'm fucked anyway:-)))).

The goal is to run option 1, until we complete the upgrade of the network, at which point I can order MX250s and just plug the SFP directly into the WAN SFP+ port of the MX250.

Any help would be much appreciated (and thanks for sticking with me till the end).

Hoder



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