As some of you may know, I am stuck in an area with limited internet access. Mainly dial-up but some "high-speed" in the school. I personally have satellite (1-way) access at home.

A friend of mine has gotten a T1 put into the school. He's also just been in an accident (he's ok, some bumps and bruises) and he can't get around to looking at the gear he had come in.

Neither of us have dealt with this type of equipment before and we have no idea exactly how it works.

The gear will likely be hooked up by a professional but I would love to have half a clue when the job gets done.

I have included some pics because other then the switch I don't know what the gear is.

Anybody got anything they could tell me about this equipment and how we might be able to hook up a wireless access point to it that would be available up to 1 kilometer away (direct line of sight distance to my house!)?

Thanks!

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Well, the 2600 is a router. That is, it connects two (or more) LANs together. One of them will be the LAN in the school. The other will be the one from your ISP that is the gateway to the internet at large. It's essentially the professional version of the SOHO Linksys/Belkin thing you've probably got at home.

A big difference is that while the interface to the school's LAN is probably ethernet, the interface to the ISP's LAN is a T1 interface. The T1 comes from the phone company, probably into the white box, if it's what I think it is, a "smart jack", which is the T1 termination point that also allows the telco to remotely loop the line for diagnostic purposes. The odd thing is that I've never seen this not provided by the phone company. It's usually their equipment installed in a locked box that they don't want you to touch at all.

From there, it goes into a CSU/DSU, which is the other small box. It's essentially the T1 modem. It converts the raw T1 data into something that the router's interface can understand. I don't really know what it actually does. Probably sorts out the time division multiplexing, etc. Certainly converts it from native T1 signalling (framing and linecoding, B8ZS/ESF, probably, just to confuse you with acronyms) to serial signalling (albeit not your PC-style RS-232 serial). I've not used one in a while, nor a separate one in even longer. Cisco actually offers a T1 interface for their routers with a CSU/DSU built in, which is what I used most recently. It's not much more expensive, either, IIRC.

Then it goes into the router, which deals with the IP LAN connections, and the switch just splits the one ethernet port from the router out to multiple ones.

Hope that helps.

Edit: It's a "smart jack", not a "smartlink". Sorry. Also cleared up what a smart jack is and added some T1 protocol info.

Thanks!
I think I'll be playing a little tomorrow.

The yellow wire that goes into the small white box is the T1 from the Telco.

It all makes some sense now. Time to read a little more tonight to study up on it all.

Thanks again!

In the case of both the small boxes, you've really got an enclosure with one replaceable card in it. The works in the General DataComm one is a SpectraComm 553 CSU/DSU. In the ADC one is an Adtran H2TU-R, which seems to be different from what I expect. I think that you're actually getting a T1 over SDSL, which I guess is the new way to do it, and may explain why the telco isn't keeping an iron fist on it. I think that it looks like SDSL to the telco, but T1 to you. Maybe that's the way all SDSL works? Regardless, after that it all looks straightforward, even if I haven't dealt with that actual CSU/DSU. Chances are you won't ever have to touch either of them more than noticing that an error light is on on one of them when your network's down and then call the telco to fix it.

From what I can see;

The top unit is a switch. This is basically where your network will live. Multiple computers will connect to the switch whereupon they can communicate with each other via layer2. It's similar to a home switch but much more versatile. It has 2 x 100baseFX (100Mbps fiber) uplink ports, one of which will connect to -

(The bottom unit is) a router. It's job is to provide layer 3 TCP/IP routing from your network to the internet. It also converts the physical media from ethernet to serial at the same time. The serial connection will connect to the T1 equipment.

This is where it gets a bit trickier, and where I'm starting to guess. The black and white boxes are both modems. I think that the black modem is being used to connect to your T1, and that the white modem might be there for Out Of Band access. (ISPs typcially provision OOB so that they can reconfigure equipment remotely.) It's not clear where the 2 grey Cat5 connections go to, but if they connect the white and black boxes together then this would make sense.

Oh, in regards to setting up a wireless connection, yeah, you can do it. Are you close to the school? You'll still have to contend with distance issues there, but it's feasible, even if you had to get directed antennas to enhance the distance. There would be a number of ways to do it:

1. Wireless interface to school's LAN. You'd be one the same network as the school. Easiest.

2.Wireless interface to a separate LAN. Your LAN would be separate from the school's. You'd have to get more IP addresses from the ISP or split the network that's being given. You could conceivably run it over the same ethernet as the school LAN and still have it separate, but you'd preferably want a separate interface from the router, which you probably don't have.

3. Wireless interface to school's LAN using your own router. I think that the 2600 can do NAT, but it may require software that wasn't purchased. If you get your own, you'd be pretty well isolated from the school LAN and the rest of the internet. Remember that neither ISP nor any of the equipment there is likely to be performing any firewalling services. I think I'd go this route.

4. You could also run a cable from the school, but ethernet has a max distance of 100m, IIRC, so that may not be much better than wireless anyway.

for medium haul wireless, there is merrit in an antenna setup. you can buy one or fiddle with milo tins.
We've got a few on our roof at work. Antennae, not milo tins.

could be an interesting few days you're in for.

milo tins

That's a new one on me.

My pal is confined to his house so I'm not sure what I'll be able to do... also note that the closest Future Shop (big store like Best Buy in the states) is approximately 600 kms away and most ma and pop stores around here don't have much (if any) wireless gear around here (with the closest ma and pop being about 160 kms away!).

I'm gonna be doind some digging. Once we get online and figure out how the unit is setup (NAT, DHCP, whatever) for sure I will be figuring out the wireless side of things. My pal is concerned with security so I got to convince him that only we will be able to access it. My house is exactly 1 kilometer away from the school and I have direct line of sight to the school. His house is probably a little closer but there are a few buildings and maybe some land that he would have to go through. I'll figure that out later with my GPS. I remember watching "The Screen Savers" a while back and they were talking about homemade directional antennas. Do any of you have any experience with this? I have satellite dishes that I could use if they would do a good job at harbouring up a signal, I did see that on TechTV as well.

Getting excited here... the Telco hasn't even been able to provide 128k ISDN in the past so I am quite anxious to try this out.

Rene

Do you like Pringles?

For security, you've got to do everything by the book. The wireless router should be set up to use encryption, including for authentification. It should also be locked down to only provide access to your specific wireless card. Preferably it would live on a DMZ network, ie outside of the school's firewall.

Authentication.

Sorry. Specific pet-peeve.

Crap. That's one of my pet peeves too. Blast my fingers.

You are right Bitt, you can configure the 2600 to do NAT. I would add if you set up wireless, since it would just be you and your buddy, do not broadcast your SSID. If it can't be seen, it will be less likely to be attacked.