Dallas Data Center

Admittedly, I’m a total nerd.  I don’t pretend to dispute it.  My wife and my son might disagree, but he’s only 6 months old.  I say he still counts, but you might not agree.  That being said, I love being the nerdy guy and when it comes to having fun at the house, it can definitely pay benefits.  This past Wednesday evening I had 7 of my closest friends over for a Fantasy Football draft.  We love doing a live draft, but this year 2 of the 10 guys in our league had moved out of the area.  We still wanted them in the league though, so I had to figure out a way keep them involved.  Well, I just happen to have a 15Mbps down internet connection with a Cisco 851 router connected to a Cisco 3550 L3 switch and a D-Link access point connected to it at the house (did I mention I’m a tech nerd?).  Yes, my electricity bill is higher than it should be, but my server, home pc, and 3 laptops also add to that expense – don’t just blame the network gear.  You might say why all the equipment, but for you true techies out there, you know the answer.  If you want to really learn, you’ve got to have your own lab.  I setup the network equipment to train for my CCNA and I got the server setup to start working with virtualization technologies a while back.  I just decided to leave it all in place so that I can continue to work in the lab whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Anyway, let’s get back to the heart of the story, the draft and how to get my two friends connected who couldn’t be there.  So even though I’ve got a 15 Mbps connection down, I’ve got closer to 1/10^th of that throughput for upload.  We decided to Skype my two friends in, but needed to ensure that the 8 other people connecting to my LAN through the access point didn’t kill the quality of the connection.  I had a couple of options.  I would have liked to setup QoS with NBAR (Network Based Access Recognition) on the WAN interface and if I’d had the right Cisco equipment and feature set, I could have done that and given a higher priority for bandwidth to the Skype traffic.  Low and behold, the feature set on the Cisco 851 is advanced security and wouldn’t do what I wanted.  I still had the 3550 switch though, which gave me a couple of other QoS options.  If the Skype PC’s were going to be in the same vLan as the wireless traffic, I could use Class Based Weighted Fair Queuing (CBWFQ) and Low Latency Queuing (LLQ).  I could have put the Skype traffic in the LLQ and all other traffic into the default CBWFQ.  If I decided not to put the Skype PC’s in the same vLan as the other traffic, I could setup policing and put a hard limit on the upload bandwidth on the access point traffic (non-Skype).  In the end I decided to put the access point in its own vLan, I plugged both Skype PC’s into the 3550, and I also put them into unique vLans.  I wanted to see how well they would perform without the QoS setup first, and decided that if I needed to configure QoS in a pinch, I’d setup the policing.  As it turned out, the connections worked great and our draft was a success.  The Skype call quality was fantastic.  Had I needed to put the policing in place, the config I would have used is below.  Good luck and go Cowboys in 2010.

mls qos

ip access-list extended UPLOADACL
permit ip any any

class-map match-all CLASS_UPLOAD
match access-group name UPLOADACL

policy-map POLICY_UPLOAD
class CLASS_UPLOAD
police 600000 150000 exceed-action drop

interface f0/2
service-policy input POLICY_UPLOAD

Signed:  Proud Nerd! (Charles Lewis)