Troubleshooting network expansion to a Second Location

[stwaltemyer]

Hello all,

My team and I are trying to come up with some possible solutions for a site expansion. Currently our building provides all network necessities to upwards of 1000+ clients. Now we are expanding into a second location.

What we want though is to route all of the activity of the second location back to our first, central, location - so we are not building our infrastructure from the ground up. Thus routing all activity through our current server room with all of our backup and firewall, etc.

The second location is two or three city blocks away. Obviously we could lay down some fiber, but that is very costly. We could also VPN, but that has its limitations as well.

What are other solutions to this type of problem?


Thank you very much,
STW

 

[-RockMan-]

Microsoft Corporation
Don't know if your using windows or windows server to do this but that maybe a very posssible way to do it.

"Directly from":
networking - How to route different traffic thru different network interfaces (in Windows) - Server Fault
The command you're looking for is route add:

Microsoft Corporation

For your setup, I think the syntax is:

route add 10.183.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.183.148.5
This will send all the traffic for 10.183.x.x to the next hop address of 10.183.148.5 which your system already knows is off of your ethernet nic, and any traffic that doesn't match a route, will be grabbed by your default route and head through your 3g connection. It also looks like your network assigns multiple routers, so you might want to double it up and add the routes for 10.183.148.6 and .7 as well.

You might need to be careful if your network has stuff not in the 10.183 range, you may need to add more routes. You may also be able to get away with routing all of 10.0.0.0/8 to your corporate network, since windows will have a more specific route, but i'm not 100% sure on that since your 3g card is giving you an IP in the 10.x.x.x range.

 

[WhiteFlare]

The most efficient way to do it, while maintaining stability, would be a VPN setup. In this type of situation, however, you may want to go with a VPN concentrator of some kind to support all the traffic. We have 3 VPN concentrators where I work to all of the sites we support (5000+) and its solid.