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Evening everyone. I'm currently experimenting with setting up a Voip system to replace our old pbx. I've used freepbx at home for a few years so I'm pretty familiar with setting that up, provisioning the phones, dialplans ext... So far I've installed the Distro on an old server, and setup 10 Cisco 7941 phones (in SIP mode) and all is working well. My main concern now is the QoS across the LAN (we will still be using our ISDN lines for external via a Patton Gateway for now). At the moment the call quality between extensions is excellent, however what with the school being almost empty the voice traffic doesn't have much to battle against. Our network has a 1G backbone, and a mixture of 100mb/1G switches (Cisco & HP). We have a number of VLANs across the site. My understanding is that the phones & Asterisk by default (in sip.conf & on the cisco phone status page) add the CoS value (5) and the DSCP code (cs3) to the packets they transmit, so is it a case of making sure 802.1p is enabled on all managed switches? Or is it necessary to setup a new Vlan just for voice and create a trunk between each phone & the switch (tagged voice vlan & untagged data vlan for the pc passthrough)? Any experience of your own way of doing this would be interesting to hear, along with suggestions on the best method in this situation. Many many thanks in advanced!

I work on a lot of projects in schools in developing countries and I am exploring the different traffic shaping options available. The issue is that I don't want to get sucked into yearly licenses since most of the schools I work in are in countries that don't have credit or budget down the road for this type of stuff. For example, I really like the options that Meraki provides, but the price is way too high and has yearly licenses. We currently use a lot of Mikrotik routers which can do this stuff, but it's complicated to do QoS and traffic shaping and is challenging to train new locals to be able to administer. There are some cool products like EasyTomato (easytomato.org) which may be what I end up relying on, but I would prefer to not flash any hardware. That whole simplicity thing just gets a bit ruined. If the yearly licenses were really reasonable and cheap, I could potentially front-load the cost, but when I frontload devices like Meraki, the cost is way too high to try to sell when I compare it to our current Mikrotik setup. Credit cards in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa is unavailable as well, even for businesses, so another knock against yearly payments. Anyone have any ideas on stuff to look into? Desired features include fair usage for bandwidth management and maybe service throttling for stuff like p2p traffic and bittorrent.

Hi, Does anyone know if things like trunks, vlans and qos are compatible between procurve and netgear switches? possibly a daft question, but i maybe purchasing a mixture of procurve and netgear in the very near future. thanks