Using fibre optics within your house pt1

Installing fibre optics in your house pt1

Current setup

So my setup is a small, a 24U 19" rack (which in hindsight, I should have bought bigger), 3 x 5GHz APs, 4 x 8 port gig switches, 2 x HP Procurve 1810-24G (with 2 SFP ports). 2 x firewalls (own build), 1 UPS, 3 x HP microservers and 2 x Thecus 5200Ns

I am planning to convert the loft and also build out a office in the garden. Plans for the office garden are below for a 8m x 4m with a 1.5m x 4m comms room on the left side, and shed storage on the right side.

To cater for this, expansion, I have recently bought another HP Procurve 1810-24G with 2 SFP and also a  MikroTik Cloud Router CRS112-8G-4S-I. This will enable me to

• Trunk and bond (Trunk and port channel in Cisco parlance) the 2 x HP Procurves
• Give me dual fibre to the loft
• Give me dual fibre to the office in the garden

HP Procurve setup

First of all, I am running VLANs on my switch, so I will need to trunk the bonded channels.

I have an external, DMZ and internal VLAN amongst others.

 

First of all under the HP web i/f go to Trunks -> Trunk Configuration

Create a new Trunk named 'switch'

Trunks -> Trunking membership and add the ports you need to trunk. I will be trunking at least 4 x 1GB ports.

 Then under VLANS -> Participation/Tagging,  and tag the other VLANs (external/DMZ/local) in there.

I have also colour coded this all as well so it makes sense say a year down the line when I try to troubleshoot it.
Red - External
Orange - DMZ
Blue - Servers (trunked)
Green - General ports
Yellow- APs
Pink - switch trunking.
The inter-switch trunk also has all the VLANs tagged on it so that VLAN traffic can be passed in between each switch

 

 

 

Mikrotik Cloud Router setup

So with this, there are 8x1GB RJ45s and 4 x SFPs!! I will configure this so that the garden office will have 2x SFP incoming and 2 x SFP to a server. The 8 x 1GB will be bridged, and that will enable the switch to act as a switch across all the bonding interfaces and standard interfaces too.

To set this up: 

• Under Interfaces -> sfp9-slave-local to sfp12-slave-local, set master port = none

• Under Interfaces -> Bonding -> Add new interface, name = bonding.SFP1. Slaves = SFP9 and SFP10

• Under Bridge -> Add new bridge, name = Bridge gig2SFP, protocol RSTP
• Under Interfaces -> VLAN 123 , interface = Bridge gig2SFP
• Under Interfaces -> VLAN 321, interface = Bridge gig2SFP

Bridge ports

• Set mode = 802.3ad, link monitoring =ARP, ARP IP target = 192.168.254 (your gateway). The reason for setting ARP rather than mii, is because if one of the link goes down, it may not actually realise this and still try to send packets down the failed link e.g. SFP9. with ARP, it sends out packets every 100ms to determine whether a specific link is down in the bond.
• Create  new Bond name = bonding.SFP2. Sales = SFP11, and SFP12
• Set the same settings as bonding.SFP1

Eventually you should have something like this:

This probably isn't correct, but I haven't bothered to read the manual and the terminology is different, but it works.

Fibre to use

I am using LC interface GBICS, and also fibre which is multimode, OM2, 50/125 (good explanation here on the numbers). The numbers basically indicate the size of the fibre itself. The 50/125 gives a higher bandwidth than 62.5/125 fibre and is more common (i.e. cheaper) so that's why I went with that.

OM1 to OM3 classifications give you basically the bandwidth rating. So OM1 is 10Mb -> 1Gb, to OM3 from 10Mb -> 10Gb. See the wikipedia article for more detail

Singlemode fibre gives you longer distances in the range of kilometers, but is way more expensive than multimode, which has an approx max run of about 550m.

For the Mikrotik, I am using 1.25G GBICs, and for the HP I am using 4G and both are 850nm (wavelength)

Conduit

You obviously need to protect the fibre running around, as it's quite fragile. Normally fibre is run in a orange conduit, and that can be a little pricey, but you can get some from ebay. I've used the non-split flexible conduit such as this previously to run fibre (TOSlink cable) for audio inside a floating wall installation.

 

Bear in mind, you can't run fibre at 90 degree angles! There is a minimum distance they can bend.