Wiring Dilemma

[J4K]

Hi,

 

I work in a large SHARED building which has multiple organisations which rent rooms in different parts of the building. We're the largest organisation in the building, thus we have our own patch cabinet and switches etc, which are stored within our own comms room. The rest of the building has its network operated by the landlord (different comms rooms) and virtually all the other organisations use the internet/network access from the landlords network.

 

However, very soon we are going to be taking over the rental of a brand new room separate to our current office space. The new office has 12 ethernet ports (6 network/ 6 IP Telephone) but will need its ethernet ports redirecting so that access through them points to our domain and server and not that of the landlords network. The downside however, is that the wiring for the new room we've acquired terminates in a patch panel which is on the opposite end of the building to where our main office (comms room) terminates at. Currently the landlord has their own networked switches on the opposite end of the building and its these switches that the wiring for the new room currently connects to.

 

What I need is to be able to terminate these ports (redirect) so that the ethernet ports are on our local domain and not the 'building wide' generic network. We have no infrastructure which resides on that side of the building. The building is quite large and shared with around 15 other small organisations. Unfortunately, the landlord only employs a single IT chap who has sadly gone on annual leave for the next few weeks. As we don't have any dealings with the landlords infrastructure and the infrastructure is currently providing network access for other tenant organisations, I'm limited in what I'm physically able to do as I can't create any disruption for other tenants. I can't physically move cabling as the new room we've taken on is rented and therefore, in the future the landlord may take that room back to be leased to another tenant organisation. I wasn't consulted about this move before the agreement was struck with the landlord - so unfortunately I'm left with quite a difficult task it would seem and a very small budget.

 

Any ideas would be much appreciated!

[mavhc]

a) find/install 1 ethernet cable from your cabinet to their cabinet, put a switch in their cabinet

b) install a 12 way bundle of cables from your to their cabinet

[strawberry]

if you can't get physcial access then you'll need to find an alternative. Possibly ethernet over power? That could cause problem elsewhere or wireless? or a wireless bridge?. or a vpn.

[Edu-IT]

Decent wireless link which you can then just remove when you leave.

[mavhc]

Ethernet over power won't work in a large building.

 

If there's dropped ceilings it's pretty easy to install a cable. Or look into going across the roof perhaps.

 

Or find a place in the building where your network and their network are close to each other, and link it there. Back to back rooms etc.

[Jamman960]

If you could setup a single uplink to the landlords network you should be able to limit traffic to a certain vlan and use 802.1x security to ensure no rouge devices get on. Then you’d just need the landlords tech to put the ports into the correct vlan, it’d scale well if you were to take on more offices in future.

[LazyD]

Normally you would just run a link cable, copper or fibre (depending on the length of the run). Your landlords are being unreasonably restrictive if they won't let you get a cable run done between ends of the building.

 

I would never recommend a wireless link (bridge) for this application. Where would you put it anyway, on the roof? They won't let you run an infrastructure cable but they will let you install a line of sight point to point radio link on the roof(s)? Doesn't make sense.

 

You need to provide a couple of fibre modules on each end and plug them into the switches on your fabric (and buy new switches if you need to) and make a standard wired link.

 

The only real alternative to a wired link is to (as strawberry said) set up a site-to-site VPN. Which will still cost money anyway as you would need to have devices on both ends that then plug into switching fabric, and all traffic would have to be tunnelled through the internet via ISP only to get back to the building, increasing latency and introducing more points of failure (including on-going management for the lifetime of the 'solution'), which would be a big shame when the required link is in the same building.

 

It will be considerably cheaper in both short and long term (for all stakeholders) to just run a wired cable.

Edited August 10, 2019 by LazyD

[p858snake]

Consider asking your landlord approval to run a cable via the roof (if its false tile) from your comms to his comms cabinet, and approval to co-locate a switch.

 

That cable would drop down to your own switch, you would then patch out the new ports to your switch.