Fun afternoon

Spent half the day with a vendor and a network architect planning some of our network alarm collector, site surveillance and remote management stuff.

 

We’re using Kentrox site manager kit, large hubs, smaller hubbed boxes, and POE sampler boards with analogue and digital inputs.  Capturing power (voltage, mains fail, bank discharge, recharge delta etc), temp/humidity, door open, shock/tilt and camera.  Door sensor will grab a frame and either FTP or mail it in, and I can stream off the box too.  Thinking about implementing a wand camera on a cable for talking thick field staff through stuff too.

 

Every site has twin, diverse, redundant in band management paths from the cloud, plus a totally standalone satellite feed that’s aggregated through the earth station in Perth for out of band backup.   That means two IP pools for the gateways with failover relearn routing in the cloud.

 

Inside the site, there’s a management IP for every box, plus IP/portforwarding via iptables to every other device, so if the IB management to one side goes down I can still hit it from IB on the other side seamlessly. We will also have port mapping to all the serial ports so I can use basic telnet or FTP to do remapped serial cut-through to any interface unless the whole site is a smoking crater.  That means we not only need a while address map for every device at the site, we also need a complete iptables map for every device and what it’s portforwarded to in cascade.

 

That’s just the backup stuff if the site manager itself goes down.

 

If the gear itself is playing up I have both IB Ethernet cut-through and OOB serial cut-through onto everything, via Craft.  Every device will have a full config map, a default boot template plus a dumped running and startup config file we can restore the site with.  Telnet in the box via OOB or have local tech do it, give it a local IP, mask and gateway.  I can now take over via telnet and dump a full running config into it, box doesn’t even need to be restarted, it takes effect on the fly.  Now I can SSH to it and start dumping in all the customised stuff.

 

Now repeat times  900x FAN sites and 120 POIs.