Here’s my setup I’m pondering.
I have Tower A with a CMM Micro and its feed with the backbone.
On Tower A i have a 57BH10 connected to the CMM Micro to Tower B
Tower B then has the slave 57BH10 and then a 900AP on it.
I don’t forsee adding addition AP or BH on Tower B. What is the least expensive way to connect the two reliably?
Just a consumer level switch like a D-Link or Netgear?
Or should I bite the bullet and buy a $500-600 POE Cisco switch?
could put in a canopy range extender. or a beefy consumer level router. depends on what your looking to do and what your doing it for.
Just looking to connect the backhaul slave the ap on Tower B in the least expensive way possible, but still reliable.
This site currently has the CMM Micro, but we’ll be moving it to Tower A.
We generally go with a modest layer 3 switch (SMC TigerSwitch) just in case we want to get fancy. For that matter, you could just use an ethernet coupler to join the two power supplies together - that will be more reliable than a consumer grade switch.
How are you doing your grounding? If you are using Canopy 600 SS then you could just join the two together. I would recommend not using a cheap home broadband switch you are just asking for trouble.
I have not tried the Canopy Surge Supressor idea but I don’t know why it would not work.
What about your AP Timeing? How are you providing your sync?
Maybe I’m missing something about transferring the sync, but I’d assume I can transfer the sync from the BH Slave to the AP?
The BH Slave recieves it from Tower A and the BH Master from the CMM Micro.
I would be using the Canopy Surge Suppressors for grounding, so maybe that would work, even though I know the short Ethernet pigtails on the Motorola Power adapters don’t work well in them, but its indoors, so i could just leave the cover off.
Ethernet couplers are the pinnacle of “unreliable”. They should be banned from sale with any sort of certifcation. I would also recommend against a consumer level switch for performance, reliability, management, and expansion reasons. Most of those should be obvious - a valid consideration for you though might be if (when?) you start using VLANs to seperate management and subscriber access or provide different types of service.
We put in Cisco 2924s wherever we can - you can pick them up on eBay for really cheap. Things are workhorses, and, at $100 a pop, no biggie if lightning takes something out.
salad wrote: Ethernet couplers are the pinnacle of "unreliable". They should be banned from sale with any sort of certifcation.
Can't say I've ever had any trouble with them in indoor environments. As long as you aren't investing in the <$10.00 cheapos (RadioShack comes to mind), you should be fine. For that matter though, the 600SS should do the trick.
As for sync - you could certainly run a sync cable between the two units, otherwise for about $150 you can pick up a syncpipe and use that to provide sync to your AP. Get the parisitics as they just steal power off of the APs PoE run.
wifiguy wrote: [quote="salad":2p3742uy]Ethernet couplers are the pinnacle of "unreliable". They should be banned from sale with any sort of certifcation.
Can't say I've ever had any trouble with them in indoor environments. As long as you aren't investing in the <$10.00 cheapos (RadioShack comes to mind), you should be fine. For that matter though, the 600SS should do the trick.[/quote:2p3742uy]
We use this "el-cheapo $5 coupler" both indoor and outdoor (eg. in an enclosure) without an issue.
You could just put in a Mikrotik Router and using the bridging capability on to use it like a switch and then later on if you want to get fancy you can. These mikrotik are very reliable and robust and will do almost anything youll ever need.
Wow…it’s quite amazing how many different setups people have. Really makes you stop and think about your own 
We install Soekris Routers at every Tower and load a image of OBSD on them for IP management and Routing. Very Solid little units…pretty cheap to.
cisco 2924 are junk. the error counters are not accurate in many cases, and i’ve had them randomly fail to switch properly in various configurations. cisco 2950 seem to be much more reliable. and they are about the same price on ebay. the 2950 can support 128 vlans with the latest firmware. cisco 2950g aren’t much more expensive, and have gigabit and 256 vlan support.
How many units have you seen these problems with? We’ve purchased possibly 2-dozen 2924s with warranties and the only problems experienced were ASIC or total failures after a lightning strike. What do you need gigabit and more than 64 VLANs for at a tower site anyway?
gigabit is nice if you have equipment that supports it. as more and more backhauls support speeds of more than 100mbps in each direction (like orthogon ptp600, dragonwave, solectek, etc) then it is damn nice to have gigabit capability. of course this is only an issue at your largest tower sites.
anyways i am exploring the limits of canopy’s vlan support by moving each customer to their own vlan. in which case 64, and 128, are not enough for most tower sites.
i just hope that adding more vlans doesn’t slow down the canopy AP (e.g. the algorithm for vlan selection better scale as O(1) and not O(n))
by the way on 2924 i saw error counters increase for ports that run 30mbps all day long with no problem. if you believed the error counter, the port was dropping 10% of packets. that makes it useless junk in my opinion.
one day i plugged in a cisco 3550 into a 100ft cable that plugged into a cisco 2924M. this is a 2924 that was in service for years. as soon as i plugged the 3550 into it, the 2924 just started randomly dropping packets on ALL ports.
i didn’t know what to do. i had to really look it over for a while to confirm that i was looking at a random switch failure. it was even affecting traffic on ports that had no relation to the traffic on the 3550’s connected port. eventually it dawned on me the problem could be the switch so i plugged in a 2950 with the configuration ported over and everything went smooth from there.
i’ve bought quite a few 2950s on ebay and some 2924s. i’m really happy with the 2950s, i’ve only had one that ever did anything questionable. and cisco still warranties several of them. they have like 5 or 7 yr warranties a lot of times so you can actually call cisco and get hardware replacement if you’re lucky. that’s after you paid $100 on ebay
Weird… sounds like you had a bad switch as one would think that should be confined to a single ASIC.
One VLAN per customer is really ambitious! Are you doing some sort of routing to aggregate them on a per-site or per-area basis or hauling each one back into your core? It sounds like fun but I just have to ask why when there are filters available on the SM
Coming a bit late on this thread…
If all you want to do is bridge the traffic to the main tower, I run both Cat5’s to the enclosure for power and use a coupler (inside the enclosure) and seal it like an RF connector. A coupler is far less likely to fail than a switch or router.
The simplest solution is usually the right one.
I agree with Jerry, even if a switch could be useful in order to perform some on-site diagnostics without having to break the service.