chrisbyrd

Paul and I are at BETT all week - come and say hello if youre' there

You missed us off the list M247 are on stand F40 - make sure you all come by and say hello

This sounds spanning-tree related to me. Do you know if you're running spanning-tree on your network? If you are, I'd suggest setting these two switches to use per-vlan STP if they're not already. It could be that they're blocking port 22 for everything (just a guess). Do you have access to the switch logs?

The fibre 'cable' itself wont have any speed - its just a physical piece of glass/plastic The speed is solely determined by whatever optics you connect to each end of it. The same piece of fibre would be equally as capable of carrying 2Mbps as it would multiple 10-Gigabit wavelengths. The best way to determine that is to pull out the optic and see what the sticker says on it (or login to whatever piece of equipment its connected to and ask it)

In non-Virgin world, its all about the Exchange. If you're in the middle of nowhere but still served by a half-decently-connected BT exchange a few miles away then there are definitely some good deals to be had

How Rural?

Dedicated 100Mbps for 12k/yr is certainly available independent of Virgin in most of the UK as well - in fact, I'd bet that a number of members of this forum are paying a fair bit less than that too

AQL is probably also worth a look

This is already very much available

You've definitely not got a network loop or some other broadcast storm? Have you got access to your packet counts on ports at either side of the link?

Most providers will deliver these connections via OpenReach wholesale 'last mile' products between your school and their network. This pricing is fixed, regardless of how far you are from your local serving phone exchange. The provider's costs will vary depending on how far away (network wise) your *exchange* is from their nearest point-of-prescence. Ie, it doesn't matter if you're next door to your serving exchange, or 5km away from it - your providers costs will be the same (if they're using OpenReach's fibre).

I was just employed for a couple of months over the summer when I left - the same time Mike discovered HP chassis switches and started putting them everywhere

I spent my entire school life from 8-18 at SES, and also worked in the IT department with Mike Hartley for a brief period. I think Mike left, but is Nick Faux still about?

I'm not super familar with Smoothwalls, but if it'll run in routed mode and take care of your NAT etc then there's no reason why not

As standard, we'd normally install a Cisco 1941 router on our 100M lines, but thats really only used for managing automatic ADSL failover You dont necessarily need a router. Your firewall/filtering box might give you all the functionality you need