[c-nsp] Equipment for a large-ish LAN event

[Jared Mauch]

> On Dec 9, 2015, at 8:13 AM, Chuck Church <chuckchurch at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Isn't game traffic fairly small in bandwidth need, but very latency
> dependent?  QOS seems like a good fit here.  Priority queue the game traffic
> based on matched ACL, and best effort everything else, re-marking it as
> necessary.  Based on previous years, what are the true bandwidth needs?  

If bandwidth isn’t an issue QoS adds no value and increases complexity
unnecessarily.  I recall when our IT department first tried to talk to us about
QoS with one of their vendors.  Once the vendor realized we had 10G links
everywhere they stopped worrying about it.  (This was 10+ years ago when most
people were doing OC48 backbones).

The biggest thing I’ve always seen is the need for accurate and realtime traffic
stats, as well as ability to do port testing.

You may want to also get some of the armored fiber cables as they are tolerant to
being stepped on and a cart running over them.  I’ve seen them at ecablemart.com as
well as other places like fiberstore.  A word of caution on fiberstore, they may use
your name without your permission in marketing, and steal your title off LinkedIn
as well even if you didn’t purchase for $dayjob.

There’s a lot of smaller tips for configuring things I’ll leave for another thread
called “fixing broken cisco defaults” (eg: mismatch in layer-2 timers vs layer-3, 
disabling nd and proxy-arp, etc).

- Jared