Networking IP Offices 3

[BobNukem]

I have one customer that is a rapidly growing chain of restaurants. There are currently 17 restaurants. The corporate headquarters has an IP406 V2 and each restaurant has a SOE. The corporate office has a dedicated T1 to the Internet and each restaurant has a fractional T1. The corporate people want to be able to call the restaurants using their data connections to reduce their long distance costs.

I cannot setup a site to site VPN between the locations because of server name duplicates. The server names cannot be changed.

Is there any way I can set this up so they can call between restaurants using their data connections?

Bob

 

[Gibsonic]

why can't you change the server names? if you want to do SCN you are going to have to have a unique name.

you could probably get it to work without SCN but i think you are running over the officially supported number of networked sites.

Is the IPO going to handle the VPN setup or is there a separate data router/vpn device that is already setup for the data network?

Call quality won't be predictable going over the public internet but it should still work for their basic needs.

 

[tlpeter]

putt a communication manager at the main location and use ip offices for the rest


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[techair]

IP Office Small Community Networking currently supports a maximum of 500 extensions across up to 16 IP Office systems.

Tl peter is wright why let a ip office work while a communication manager does the job with 2 fingers in his ...

 

[Gibsonic]

well that's one solution...but probably too expensive for this type customer for what they want to use it for.

 

[ProviderReborn]

If you are using SOE's could you not use IP SEC Lics on the IP Offices. With public IP's on LAN2. Create the tunnels but then restrict the amount of IP's the IPOffice route across the WAN side of things so it would not matter if you had duplicate server names. Either that or use different IP Ranges for the SOE's.

Dont forget your basics, ie Star topolgy, 16 Sites, 500 Extensions and 1 VM system per SCN.

Have some good sucess with using these lics. However have never needed to restrict what would talk to what to avoid issue with the dupicate server names.

 

[Gibsonic]

you know, ive wondered on several occasions how hard it would be to convert an IPO to a G150 gateway. I know it's not supported and all that, but it certainly seems possible.

Having to admin 17 switches compared to 1 seems worth a bit of effort IMO. If they could get a CM at the HQ and then just use G150 gateways at the remotes then that would simplify administration. Since they've already got sunk cost in the IPO's it makes sense to continue to use them.

 

[intrigrant]

You can use L2TP without the need of a license, do not use SCN but use access codes for the different locations.
In the HQ use a proper VPN router to terminate the L2TP tunnels from the remote sites.
Then there is no limit on 16 sites or 500 users.
I helped on such a config with over 40 sites and it will grow to approx 96 sites.
Planning is important, technical stuff can be solved if you think creative.
This is a lot cheaper as a CM and you do not have to work with EGS wich makes life a lot easier.

 

[jamie77]

SIP trunks?????

Jamie Green

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Fooball is not a matter of life and death-It is far more important!!!!

 

[BobNukem]

Gibsonic - We cannot change the server names because the point of sale equipment is hard coded with the server it uses to report sales and authorize credit cards, etc. We are not concerned about the call quality since this is for "in house" communication.

tlpeter - The corporate office is small and they deal with razor thing margins so they are looking for an inexpensive solution. CM would be overkill and more money than they want to spend.

intrigrant - You have come up with an interesting solution! I gave you a star! However, wouldn't there still be naming conflicts with an L2TP connection between Corporate and all the SOE's? I agree that SCN is out of the question because there will be 20 to 30 restaurants in a couple of years.

Everybody - Thanks for all the ideas. I'm going to start experimenting with some of the ideas with our demo SOE.

Bob

 

[Gibsonic]

the names conflict thing is really only a problem if SCN is turned on.

one thing to remember is that in order to do centralized voicemail for all remote sites SCN will have to be turned on.

so to have SCN off your voicemail options get slim real quick. local embedded or vm lite at each site.

since these are restaurants maybe they don't even need vm at each location.

if they did need one phone like a manager's phone to have vm locally, you could use an IP phone that is registered to the HQ 406.

another option concerning VM at remote sites without SCN would be to have every phone's RNA and Busy forward to a shortcode that points to a unique phantom user on the 406 that does have VM. You wouldn't get any MWI in this scenario though...except maybe if you had callback/outcalling turned on back to that external DID or something.

just some ideas and thoughts.

 

[BobNukem]

SCN will not be used because they are over the SCN limit already.

We are doing VM Lite at each location. The restaurants will be all over the US so we run into time zone issues and they have a hunt group setup that takes phone orders. They want an individualized queue message at each location. The manager's office is the only VM needed so I could do centralized for that but because of the issues listed above, we went with VM Lite.

Thanks for your input!

Bob

 

[PlatinumGuy]

I know of a site with 1000 users over 17 sites.

It works but it isnt supported.

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[JayNEC]

This doesn't make sense. Why is the server duplicate name an issue?
As long as those servers are not on the same LAN they won't see each other's name in order to have a conflict. This occurs on a windows network via broadcast, and those just won't pass over a VPN or a WAN.

 

[Saabboy93]

You may be able to setup VPN's if you use VPN routers at each location. Mutlitech makes VOIP devices that you can use to setup ports at each ends of the tunnels. I used two of them and two Linksys ROV42 VPN routers to send extensions between two offices over DSL and cable connections. The name of the device eludes me at this moment but it basically has 4 ports and a network port, the programming can be done via web browser. I remember it took me a few minutes to setup the tunnel and then point the two mulititech devices to each other.
You should be able to do the same using a RVO82 which can support up to 100 VPN tunnels, basically set one up at each location to connect all the 17 restaurants. Then you can use either the tunneling on the IPOFFICE to connect the Avaya systems, or the multitech devices.
Either way its very do-able without disturbing the servers.

 

[BobNukem]

Networking is not my strong point but I have been told that duplicate names become a problem once sites are networked together with a VPN. Please let me know if this is not correct. Here is a more detailed description of the network.

Coporate is using 192.168.0.X subnet. All the restaurants are using 192.168.1.X subnet and their point of sale server is named POSServer. The name of that server cannot be changed because all of the POS terminals are hard coded to look for that particular server. The SOE switch and a voicemail server are on the same network however the VM server has a unique name.

If I network the SOE to a VPN router which then connects to the IP406 at Corporate, wouldn't Corpoarate network "see" all of the POS servers and conclude there is a conflict?

Bob

 

[ProviderReborn]

Can you not put the IP Offices on a seperate network and ensure there is not routing for the POSServers.

 

[IPOfficeGuru]

If all remote sites are using the same class c 192.168.1.0, then you MUST reassign each site it's own unique class C. (Period)
Calls in CallManager or SCN will require unique addressing at each site for routing purposes, in order to route calls over the proper IP Trunk.
Your problem is more of a poor poor WAN design issue than a capaciy issue with the IPO, as we also have deployments over the 16 site recommendation.

 

[BobNukem]

TheProvider:

We can't put the phone switch on a separate network because the "Voice Mail" server is actually a multi-purpose server that must talk to everything in the store. For example, the customer uses it to distribute antivirus definitions to all of the PC's in the store.

IPOfficeGuru:

Thanks for pointing out the IP address issue. I thought the IP addresses might create a problem.

>>Your problem is more of a poor poor WAN design issue<<

This is a classic example of a small business that has grown to a medium size business and is now trying to transition to a large business. When we started with them they only had 5 stores and the individual store managers would hook up their own networks!! These people know the restaurant business well but they are not IT professionals by any stretch of the imagination. As they grew bigger, they hired an outside contractor to standardize their network implementation. No one ever thought there would be any need to network stores. That's how all the stores ended up using the same IP addresses.

Now they have a full time IT person working on connectivity issues and we are trying to get all of the phone switches to communicate because they have a need to do so. I thought the story behind the mess might be interesting to some people.

Bob

 

[JayNEC]

The duplicate server names at each site won't matter. Unless you try to setup a windows domain model with these servers either as members or controllers. If they continue as their own workgroup servers, without knowledge of each other, it won't cause a problem.. This includes - don't point at each other for DNS or allow them to register themselves in DNS centrally somewhere. Also, don't allow netbios broadcast across the VPN links.