Symmetrical?
No, not sure what the up speed is if that is what you are asking. We both had 150/20 service separately and still have contracts. So brother moved his to new address, then I talked with Retention department to terminate mine with the caveat of upgrading my brother’s plan and we split the bill.
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Yeah, symmetrical/asymmetrical is jargon for “is the up the same as the down”.
So, just keep in mind that the USG Pro won’t be able to saturate 300 with IDS/IPS and/or Smart QOS enabled. These features preclude hardware offloading, so your power consumption will go up as well.
That said, in my experience, you don’t need smart QOS for connections over 100mbs. For slower connections, it does help, especially if buffer bloat is an issue.
I have the smaller Unifi Gateway at my apartment with smart QOS on, but only for outgoing traffic (35mbs in my case). Doing so does not hurt my download bandwidth (200).
Dont have much to contribute here other than on the topic of IP cameras.
I run some cheap Reolink cameras, and have had great luck with them. The ones you are using are even cheaper. If they are doing what you need, that is awesome.
In the topic of software, I can firmly recommend against Zoneminder, if you will have end users accessing it. While I only run a home setup, I can only imagine trying to help an end user, or train an end user that is not tech savy to use it. Great software, dont get me wrong, but not for the average user.
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Ha! Finally figured out how to quote with this forum lol. We have a Plex server that has a select few friends and family streaming off of it. So that would be the only area where we would look at managing bandwidth.
Only have two of those cameras at the moment and have just tapped into the stream with VLC. Did have MotionEyeOS on a Pi3 but is pretty sluggish. Going to give Zoneminder a shot.
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Smart QOS is going to help you if you run into an issue where one person downloading/uploading a large file brings everyone else to a halt or if you’re overloading the buffer in the modem.
IDS is to detect bad actors trying to break into your network. So these are kind of separate concerns from your Plex server.
See how it works with a vanilla config and then troubleshoot from there. If you find that QOS is necessary and it’s limiting the bandwidth that you’re paying for, it would be worth looking into using pfsense on the edge and just letting the Unifi manage the LAN.
If you do get to the point where you want to add a pfsense gateway for cheap, you should look into getting a used thin client. You could even get 2 and set them up to fail over. They aren’t expensive.
I would get a 1.5" or 2" tube.
The trick we used to do, was get a bucket of string.
You tape a chunk of electrical tape to the end, enough to give it a weight. and use a vacuum cleaner to pull the string through. Don’t cut the string, Attach the fiber cables in line, and pull the string. with the fiber attached to the string over a length of about 1-2 feet You want to distribute the load as much as you can. When you pull it through, have someone feeding from the source. Take your time.
The goal is to alleviate as much tension as possible.
When I used to do this for FPL, we were running 48 Pair Fiber, and it has an inline Kevlar insulator, so we were never really pulling on the fiber.
So we always had to get creative when we were pulling one-offs.
I did the HDPE tubing thing twice, ended up getting the tubing from a local builder supplier who carries plumbing stuff like rigid PVC and copper piping. They had large wooden spools of it sitting outside and they just cut off as much as we asked going by the markings on the tube. Now the problem with HDPE is that it’s flexible but not that flexible, the thicker the conduit you get the thicker the material is going to be and the more effort it’s going to take to straighten it before digging it into the ground. Just try and straighten it before you start digging. I’ve done the thing this way twice so far, carrying fiber and power both times and straightening was the difficult part.
The yellow jacket cable you mention should be fine, we’ve done it with the armored one https://www.fs.com/products/20720.html since there was a significant run after it entered the house both times, but it’s basically kevlar you’re going to be pulling on and the 2mm one has plenty, I wouldn’t worry too much beyond making sure you’re pulling on the cable itself and not the connector. We passed fiber first, (2 duplex fiber cables both times) because of the connectors and then the thicker electrical cable.
We’ve had a literal fishing line as a draw string: the 8x j-braid kind, don’t remember what thickness or rating, but it was multi colored every 10m, and we paid like $30 for it. It was connected to a thin plastic bag and a regular vacuum cleaner on the other side and it took about 30seconds to vacuum 150m of it. First time we managed not to catch the bag entering the vacuum cleaner in time, almost broke the vacuum. Second time we used a metal kitchen strainer.
We ended up wrapping a number of loops of electrical tape around the fiber cable and then tied the fishing line onto it and then a few more loops of electrical tape. And that worked fine.
With the fiber, we ended up pulling another draw string but we could have vacuumed it through probably. With fiber still inside.
The power was powering a wifi-ish antenna in one case and a camera and a wifi-ish antenna in the other case.
Oh and it was dug at about 30-50cm deep, mostly around 50cm, and we put yellow plastic ‘electricity’ tape above it when covering the cable… Not sure what good it’s going to do when someone takes heavy machinery towards it and the stupid couple of rolls of tape ended up costing almost as much as the fiber for some reason but there you go.
Chime in here and say that I have 4 of these deployed running suricatta and site to site VPNs and they are still running strong. Great units you can pick up for less than $200 all in.
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So scored big the other day when I dropped off my nephews at my parent’s place with my brother and pickup pipe layer attachment for our tractor. Got to talking with our dad, he is a security systems tech, and he walked us out to his hoarding barn. Over the years he has salvaged left over spools of various cables and one of these spools happens to be 600ft of direct burial 48 fiber! Multimode to boot.
We need to do our final measuring but sure we can get my place and his ran with that 600ft spool.
Now since we don’t need 48 fiber connections, what suggestions are there? Bragging rights?
Sooo… How do you terminate it?
Yer bragging rites you have enough dark fiber to run a small country 
Luckily my dad has the equipment to terminate for us.
Thanks to everyone giving me your input with this. This last Friday, the deal closed on the property so there are some other priorities to get done first (like what is more important than getting your network up??). The usual country property construction issues where stuff was built to just work but not necessarily safe to use. So right now we have enough APs between us to shoot internet across the property at an acceptable speed.
We’ll be back fill you all in when we get to installing equipment and running fiber.
… LOL, I’m moving into a house… and I still haven’t moved all my stuff but have already contacted an electrician to ask him to snake through some network drops and move cabling for me, while I still don’t have a washing machine… Priorities
Got an update for everyone! 4 months later…
So we are dropping a building so to speak. I will get a run still, but later on this year probably.
We did trench between 2 houses and our shop server closet.
Google Photos made a little movie out of it.
Next step is getting the two runs into the shop and then running other end of one run under the house and up into the office.
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depending on the distance between buildings ethernet cabling can cause problems.
If burying conduit whether its pvc or ridgid you must comply with the 360 degree rule.
(If total of bends in conduit runs exceed 360 degrees it can and will result in insulation damage) therefor over 360 degrees is a code failure for either power or communication cabling.
while installing a fiber-net may be more costly it is not hindered as much by distance as wire is and also not subject to induced “noise”
so its entirely possible for fiber net to be more economical maintenance wise.
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Haven’t read the entire thread but my suggestions based on real world experience would be:
- if possible, link them up all as layer 2, and trunk all the vlans you need to all switches
- firewall based on VLAN (or user), not on physical building/location/switch
- have enough switch ports for all your physical wall ports so you can not be moving cables constantly (i.e., hook up every wall port whether a user is currently there or not). You’ll take a hit to switching cost up front but believe me it will pay dividends in long term maintenance (your structured cabling can be done properly once and then lock the cabinet - you won’t end up with a mess of spaghetti). And the end users will know that if a port is on the wall it should work without needing cables to be hooked up. The port cost hit will quickly be recouped in less lost time for employees being unable to work due to waiting on physical cabling changes to be performed or more ports to be procured.
- have a cabling spreadsheet that links wall port to switch/port (and maybe VLAN config on the switch) - so that you can reprogram a wall port for whatever vlan without leaving your desk - or just look at the spreadsheet and confirm what VLAN a port is on without needing to even log into a switch
- lock the cabinets once your structured cabling is done so idiots don’t fuck it up
- spend the money required and physical space required to do your structured cabling properly (i.e., neatly according to a schedule/logical plan. not ad-hoc plugging wall sockets into spare physical ports as required).
Your first thought might be to give each building its own VLANs and layer 3 subnet(s) and firewall based on building, etc. but i guarantee you that within a couple of weeks some person will move from building A to building B (assuming you’re all the same company or corporation) and need to get on the building A network from there.
So don’t fuck yourself over by doing different subnets per building if you can avoid it. 
- it will make your firewall life so much easier if people’s IPs and thus access rules follow them from building to building.
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I second this. Unless SFP ports raise your hardware cost too much (shouldn’t) or you have a big pipe and leave yourself a pull string I’d link the buildings with fiber
Should leave a pull string regardless
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Yeah, i’d definitely do fibre from building to building. No way would i use copper (only).
Your big costs will be trenching, cable pulling and cable termination. Fibre cable is cheap. Even if you don’t terminate it, ensure that you either run the fiber or have a big enough conduit to run it later.
And that’s another thing. Don’t be stingy with conduit size. Err on the side of go large, it makes pulling cable much, much easier and you can accomodate later cable requirements easier. i.e., do not use 25mm conduit even if it may in theory do the job for the immediate future.
The SFP costs aren’t a massive deal unless you’re looking at single mode long haul - if you’re inside a couple of hundred metres go multi-mode.
Multi-mode optics are SO much cheaper.
Oh, and when you do run the fibre… as above, trenching and termination costs are the big ones (don’t forget any costs to dig up and repair paving, concrete, gardens, close roads and do traffic management if required, dig permits if applicable, etc.). The total BOM/job cost to bump up the number of pairs in your fibre is not that bad, especially when stacked against the cost to dig another trench. Run more pairs in the cable than you need, even if you don’t immediately terminate them.
edit:
you’ve got a 48 core fibre spool? good times. even if you only need a few pairs, having more is always useful for future needs.