Hey guys, looking for some input on buying a used, higher end fully managed switch(s). Once upon a time I designed, deployed , and maintained pretty large networks for various types of organizations, back around the dotcom boom and subsequent apocalypse, and for a handful of years after that. Was pretty deep on the Cisco side back then, had CCNA/CCNP, I guess, 20 years ago. Like a lot of people here I presume. I still like to think I'm reasonably capable/adept at this sort of thing, although I've mostly been using consumer/prosumer level networking equipment, as I've had little need for anything complex, other than commercial cell modems for my remote cabin property.
I've moved full time to my remote cabin property, which is on the side of a large (for the eastern ranges) mountain, I've got 30 acres surrounded by 2000 acres of national forest, with only one full time neighbor, below, and not very close to me. I'm 30 minutes from the nearest gas station or store of any type, internet thus far is an abysmal 4G LTE connection that while I get a solid signal, the tower is for shit. There is fiber available about a mile down my very rough 4wd only road, unfortunately I was unaware of a grant period to cover infrastructure so I haven't been able to stomach the few thousand dollars necessary to have it run. I'm working on some loopholes however. I am fully 100% off-grid in terms of infrastructure, electrical, water/sewer, etc, and plan to remain that way. I've got fairly good renewable resources however. Growing PV array, already about 25kWh of lithium storage, and eventually will have at least 100kW, as I'll be running my machine shop off renewables as much as possible. For the most part, I've got reasonable privacy (though not as much as you'd expect) and little intrusion, however, since covid, increasingly more random people have been venturing out from the city looking for entertainment, and hunting season is always a caveat, since the 2000 acres of national forest I'm adjacent to, is designated "gamelands". I have no issue with hunters or hunting in general of course (I'm pretty sure I was born a grumpy old caveman (with a contradictory side-interested in technology), out of time and place and living here is my way of correcting that misalignment). However, since one of the main varieties of hunting that occurs in this area, is bear hunting, which involves large packs of unruly, seemingly poorly trained in any area other than chasing down bears, hounds of various types who all appear to be primarily bred for their unique ability to sound like someone is hate raping a baby seal, whenever they open their mouths to cry-bark incessantly; being turned loose on the mountain to simply roam in search of mischief. Even though they all have expensive GPS collars on, and even though I've got my land posted, and it's hard to miss considering you have to drive through my land on both sides of the road to get into this area very easily, they always seem to end up over here tearing shit up, and driving my Great Dane and me insane. Usually between 2 and 4 am.
Anyway, all that backstory, which I describe mostly for your entertainment, has had various implications, to try and solve this encroachment, hopefully diplomatically. The primary way it relates to my question is in making me finally get serious about my surveillance plan. I'm sure you can imagine however that 30 acres of steep mountainous, heavily wooded, temperate rain-forest (look it up, I'm in the Appalachians of Western NC), and generating all my own electricity, has it's challenges.
I'm installing who knows how many, PoE IP cameras of various types. Figuring out my whole NVR/Detection/recording scheme is a whole other can of worms, but primarily I am in desperate need of robust core network infrastructure to handle all the data. The obvious answer to me seemed to be buy some good used, not insanely old, but inexpensive commercial/enterprise gear, since I used to be pretty adept at utilizing it. One thing I didn't really consider once I started wading through the ebay cesspool, is the ubiquity of "cloud managed" enterprise network equipment, I almost pulled the trigger on what seemed like a great, not insanely old Cisco "Meraki" 48 port GbE switch, until fortunately I did a little more slow-poke research and realized it's basically a glorified doorstop without a license and access to the cloud based management tools. Obviously the old "Totalitarian-Dictator Network Overlord / Luddite" of my previous life is appalled by the concept, though I have heard the youngers poking fun at all us "Boomers (do you idiots really think that every generation older than what, millennials were Baby Boomers? Even my parents weren't "boomers" by any accepted definition)", for wanting localized, let alone fully isolated or restricted control over basically anything, so clearly I'm just totally out of touch in my ancient and senile old age of barely in my 40s. ;D
So, finally, my big question: What "vintage", "dumb" aka not cloud based, not subscription license requiring, or other major caveats; fully managed, enterprise quality switches should I be considering? PoE isn't absolutely mandatory, though convenient, as most of the IP Cams I'm using thus far have aux 12v dc input. I will end up needing probably one larger 48 port all Gig-E, primary switch at my cabin, and obviously I'm going to need to have a few distributed hub locations at various corners of my property, as the cable alone would cost me a fortune if I tried to run each camera a direct cable, let alone the infrastructure considerations or the fact that most of them would exceed the maximum cable length without repeaters etc. Ideally a switch with a handful of 10Gb SFP uplinks would seem optimal for connecting those other subs. One really really majorly ideal bonus feature, which I know was readily available as an option back in my day, is a device that supports external DC power source. I have built the overwhelming majority of my primary infrastructure here directly DC powered, to avoid conversion losses from using Inverters, it hasn't been difficult since the overwhelming majority of electronics and logic are DC powered anyway, usually you can just eliminate the wall-wort, make a new cable and utilize a voltage and/or current regulating device, although a large amount of devices that are 12VDC powered will run fine from the standard 11.x-14.x volt range of typical 12V nominal battery banks (my primary bank however is 48V nominal, but I have a dedicated 12V nominal bank just for running electronics like networking equipment, lighting, etc). I know some of the old Cisco Catalyst 3000 series switches tick most of the boxes, I don't recall them requiring an active license to be functional but my memory isn't exactly stellar for small details two decades past, and I know these models are that old. I know Juniper had some switches that seem to fit the bill as well, that are a bit newer, although I'm not sure any of them have the DC backup power option, or if there's any caveats with them regarding licenses or cloud BS either. I've seen brands that didn't appear to exist during my day as well, like Riverbed? Seem to have some good deals on high spec switches but I couldn't figure out whether they have mandatory cloud features or not. (Cloud stuff is ok if it's not mandatory for functionality, and can be shut down. Currently I don't have the bandwidth to waste even if I wanted to use it, my connection is at best 10Mb down and less than 1Mb up with intermittent packet loss and regular full-stop go-fuck yourself latency for no apparent rhyme or reason. Regardless, it's not something I'd want even if I could spare the throughput.
I should probably also mention that I am far from wealthy, so this will be rolling out incrementally, and as I can find insane deals on stuff. I'm looking to spend no more than a few hundred bucks on a switch, preferably $200 or less. Fortunately I've got a couple spools of Cat6 cable on hand, plenty of extra PC components etc, wire galore, and am a decent machinist/fabricator .
Well anyway, thanks all for indulging my rambling story and entertaining my questions, any help is appreciated. TLDR: need recommends on older (and inexpensive) 48 and 24 port enterprise managed GbE switches that don't require actively maintained licenses or cloud anything to be utilized. PoE is a plus, as well as support for remote DC power, a few 10Gb SFP etc uplink ports would also be nice, but they don't have to be included if there are module slots for them.
Thanks all!
I've moved full time to my remote cabin property, which is on the side of a large (for the eastern ranges) mountain, I've got 30 acres surrounded by 2000 acres of national forest, with only one full time neighbor, below, and not very close to me. I'm 30 minutes from the nearest gas station or store of any type, internet thus far is an abysmal 4G LTE connection that while I get a solid signal, the tower is for shit. There is fiber available about a mile down my very rough 4wd only road, unfortunately I was unaware of a grant period to cover infrastructure so I haven't been able to stomach the few thousand dollars necessary to have it run. I'm working on some loopholes however. I am fully 100% off-grid in terms of infrastructure, electrical, water/sewer, etc, and plan to remain that way. I've got fairly good renewable resources however. Growing PV array, already about 25kWh of lithium storage, and eventually will have at least 100kW, as I'll be running my machine shop off renewables as much as possible. For the most part, I've got reasonable privacy (though not as much as you'd expect) and little intrusion, however, since covid, increasingly more random people have been venturing out from the city looking for entertainment, and hunting season is always a caveat, since the 2000 acres of national forest I'm adjacent to, is designated "gamelands". I have no issue with hunters or hunting in general of course (I'm pretty sure I was born a grumpy old caveman (with a contradictory side-interested in technology), out of time and place and living here is my way of correcting that misalignment). However, since one of the main varieties of hunting that occurs in this area, is bear hunting, which involves large packs of unruly, seemingly poorly trained in any area other than chasing down bears, hounds of various types who all appear to be primarily bred for their unique ability to sound like someone is hate raping a baby seal, whenever they open their mouths to cry-bark incessantly; being turned loose on the mountain to simply roam in search of mischief. Even though they all have expensive GPS collars on, and even though I've got my land posted, and it's hard to miss considering you have to drive through my land on both sides of the road to get into this area very easily, they always seem to end up over here tearing shit up, and driving my Great Dane and me insane. Usually between 2 and 4 am.
Anyway, all that backstory, which I describe mostly for your entertainment, has had various implications, to try and solve this encroachment, hopefully diplomatically. The primary way it relates to my question is in making me finally get serious about my surveillance plan. I'm sure you can imagine however that 30 acres of steep mountainous, heavily wooded, temperate rain-forest (look it up, I'm in the Appalachians of Western NC), and generating all my own electricity, has it's challenges.
I'm installing who knows how many, PoE IP cameras of various types. Figuring out my whole NVR/Detection/recording scheme is a whole other can of worms, but primarily I am in desperate need of robust core network infrastructure to handle all the data. The obvious answer to me seemed to be buy some good used, not insanely old, but inexpensive commercial/enterprise gear, since I used to be pretty adept at utilizing it. One thing I didn't really consider once I started wading through the ebay cesspool, is the ubiquity of "cloud managed" enterprise network equipment, I almost pulled the trigger on what seemed like a great, not insanely old Cisco "Meraki" 48 port GbE switch, until fortunately I did a little more slow-poke research and realized it's basically a glorified doorstop without a license and access to the cloud based management tools. Obviously the old "Totalitarian-Dictator Network Overlord / Luddite" of my previous life is appalled by the concept, though I have heard the youngers poking fun at all us "Boomers (do you idiots really think that every generation older than what, millennials were Baby Boomers? Even my parents weren't "boomers" by any accepted definition)", for wanting localized, let alone fully isolated or restricted control over basically anything, so clearly I'm just totally out of touch in my ancient and senile old age of barely in my 40s. ;D
So, finally, my big question: What "vintage", "dumb" aka not cloud based, not subscription license requiring, or other major caveats; fully managed, enterprise quality switches should I be considering? PoE isn't absolutely mandatory, though convenient, as most of the IP Cams I'm using thus far have aux 12v dc input. I will end up needing probably one larger 48 port all Gig-E, primary switch at my cabin, and obviously I'm going to need to have a few distributed hub locations at various corners of my property, as the cable alone would cost me a fortune if I tried to run each camera a direct cable, let alone the infrastructure considerations or the fact that most of them would exceed the maximum cable length without repeaters etc. Ideally a switch with a handful of 10Gb SFP uplinks would seem optimal for connecting those other subs. One really really majorly ideal bonus feature, which I know was readily available as an option back in my day, is a device that supports external DC power source. I have built the overwhelming majority of my primary infrastructure here directly DC powered, to avoid conversion losses from using Inverters, it hasn't been difficult since the overwhelming majority of electronics and logic are DC powered anyway, usually you can just eliminate the wall-wort, make a new cable and utilize a voltage and/or current regulating device, although a large amount of devices that are 12VDC powered will run fine from the standard 11.x-14.x volt range of typical 12V nominal battery banks (my primary bank however is 48V nominal, but I have a dedicated 12V nominal bank just for running electronics like networking equipment, lighting, etc). I know some of the old Cisco Catalyst 3000 series switches tick most of the boxes, I don't recall them requiring an active license to be functional but my memory isn't exactly stellar for small details two decades past, and I know these models are that old. I know Juniper had some switches that seem to fit the bill as well, that are a bit newer, although I'm not sure any of them have the DC backup power option, or if there's any caveats with them regarding licenses or cloud BS either. I've seen brands that didn't appear to exist during my day as well, like Riverbed? Seem to have some good deals on high spec switches but I couldn't figure out whether they have mandatory cloud features or not. (Cloud stuff is ok if it's not mandatory for functionality, and can be shut down. Currently I don't have the bandwidth to waste even if I wanted to use it, my connection is at best 10Mb down and less than 1Mb up with intermittent packet loss and regular full-stop go-fuck yourself latency for no apparent rhyme or reason. Regardless, it's not something I'd want even if I could spare the throughput.
I should probably also mention that I am far from wealthy, so this will be rolling out incrementally, and as I can find insane deals on stuff. I'm looking to spend no more than a few hundred bucks on a switch, preferably $200 or less. Fortunately I've got a couple spools of Cat6 cable on hand, plenty of extra PC components etc, wire galore, and am a decent machinist/fabricator .
Well anyway, thanks all for indulging my rambling story and entertaining my questions, any help is appreciated. TLDR: need recommends on older (and inexpensive) 48 and 24 port enterprise managed GbE switches that don't require actively maintained licenses or cloud anything to be utilized. PoE is a plus, as well as support for remote DC power, a few 10Gb SFP etc uplink ports would also be nice, but they don't have to be included if there are module slots for them.
Thanks all!