MX as Home Router

[marhill2]

Hi,

I was thinking of purchasing the MX device as a WAN router to replace my 2821. I know this may sound overkill but I am a Cisco employee and get a discount on Meraki products. My question is, currently I am running EIGRP between my Cisco 2821 and my L3 4948 switch. Would I be able to run some sort of routing protocol between the MX device and the 4948? If not I noticed that it does support static routes. Would that work to allow me to point router to the 3 VLANs on the 4948 switch?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Marcus

[PhilipDAth]

In "normal" NAT'ed mode (where you plug your Internet circuit directly into the MX and have a private LAN on the other side) you can't do dynamic routing.

You would, as you have noted, configure a static route(s) on your MX pointing to the 4948 for every L3 VLAN it has configured on it.  And on the 4948 you could have a single default route pointing to the MX.

Depending on how big your home network is, an MX65 could be a good choice since it has 10 LAN ports, and 2 of those are PoE ports.  If you have less than 10 devices you don't even need a separate switch anymore.

https://meraki.cisco.com/products/appliances/mx65

[marhill2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Phillip,

Thanks for the quick reply! I am using the 4948 because of the 10Gig SFP ports it has. I have an ESXi server that runs on that link and the 10Gig just makes things much nicer. So probably will keep the 4948 and run static routes to the 4948 from the MX box.

The reason I am looking to replace the 2821 is for some odd reason when I try to enable IPv6 I get issues. As soon as I turn on "ipv6 unicast-routing" internet connectivity is lost. I still get an IP from my modem and what not but loose connectivity. Anyways, separate issue that probably shouldn't be addressed here. I am going to research more into the MX devices and see if its going to be a good fit. I love my MR32 Access Point now that I have it working correctly. Its tough getting used to a GUI based platform when you have been in the CLI for so long.

[Uberseehandel]

---

@marhill2 wrote:

Its tough getting used to a GUI based platform when you have been in the CLI for so long.

---

It's probably more difficult than giving up smoking. But worth it, as mostly fewer typos.

[PhilipDAth]

Note that the Meraki MX family does not support IPv6.

If you want IPv6 let me give you some other [reasonably priced[ Cisco options:

• Cisco 897, comes with Advanced IP, has ADS:/VDSL/Gigabit WAN/SFP and an 8 port Gigabit LAN switch.
• Cisco 891F, comes with Advanced IP, FastEthernet WAN, Gigabit WAN and an 8 port Gigabit LAN switch
• The new Cisco 1100 series, comes with IP Base - but runs IOS-XE

The 890 series will do around 170Mb/s with "everything turned on".  More than likely, they would beat the crap out of your 2811 at a fraction of the 2811 price.  I like the 890 series because they come with Advanced IP.  They can even do MPLS (I measured them doing 700 Mb/s of L3 MPLS VPN !!!).

The Cisco 1100 series is the lowest end platform that runs the "new" IOS-XE.  It is comparable to the 890, but it only comes with IP Base.  You would probably want to add a security licence to it.

[BlakeRichardson]

10Gb SFP at home  

[Uberseehandel]

The MX/Meraki system could be really excellent as a home system, but it doesn't do Multicast properly which rather nixes home deployment as far as IP TV from SSM content providers. For parents, the ability to control the kids' mobile devices is ace, as is the integration of CCTV and VoIP.

[marhill2]

Gonna try to reply to everyone here haha

Phill -  Thanks for the detailed alternatives! I'll definitely take a look into those and compare them with the discount I get for being a Cisco employee.

Blake - Yes, I have several VM's that have lots of traffic running to them. I wanted to make sure I wasn't bottle necked 🙂

Ubersee -  Considering my job is mostly dealing with CLI, I doubt I'll ever stop using it. Unless, I start getting into to ACI. Also most Cisco boxes are complicated to setup when it comes to IPTV from a service provider, at least it was for me when I had AT&T Uverse. My work around was just to include the IPTV boxes into the native VLAN 1 and they worked fine. However, now I use Playstation Vue which all of my TV's go through a separate VLAN (WiFi for my Firesticks and Wired for my NVIDIA Sheild TV). Everything is working perfectly now and I would assume they would work after deploying the MX device, so long as I get the routes to where they need to go.

Thanks again for all you guys help. Glad to see my topic was very interesting to you guys and you took the time to write responses that were very helpful!

Cheers!

Marcus

[PhilipDAth]

I'm sure you can see the writing on the wall - but the CLI will be getting deprecated from Cisco Enterprise kit.  How long, who knows.  Everything you know about CLI will be worthless inside of 10 years.  One Cisco developer (as in works for Cisco Enterprise) told me he thought Cisco would stop developing the CLI within 7 years.

Everything is going SDN - DNA Controller, APIC EM, etc.

So now it is a question about which SDN you want to learn going forward .... Python with DNA Controller with a terribly limited GUI, or Python with Meraki with a great GUI.

I've changed course, and now back the Meraki path.

[Uberseehandel]

---

@marhill2 wrote:

Ubersee -  . .  . Also most Cisco boxes are complicated to setup when it comes to IPTV from a service provider, at least it was for me when I had AT&T Uverse. My work around was just to include the IPTV boxes into the native VLAN 1 and they worked fine. 

---

Marcus

Thanks for your suggestion. I guess there are a number of ways of implementing multicast, and the Far East, Europe and North America do it differently. Despite being told by Meraki support that the MX won't handle BT's flavour of SSM IP TV, I have tried setting up some firewall rules, without success - e.g. an outbound rule that allows anything to 224.0.0.0/4, 109.159.247.0/24 (the ranges used by BT). Testing is simple, I use VLC Media Player on a workstation and then rtp://234.81.130.4:5802 - which is the unencrypted test channel. I know the switch is OK as I have used it with the BT POS "HomeHub" and it works.

All this is slightly more difficult for me as I'm not a network engineer, although I have several MNO clients, I tend to do strategy, Informatics and projects, so there is always somebody else to look after the configuration side. But I did quite a lot of packet capture and sent them off to the support folk at one of my previous Bay Area stack suppliers, to no avail.

By one of life's ironies, sitting in Meraki's UK office is the engineer who set up how the IPTV box was to interact with the multicast streams and all the required network infrastructure, unfortunately he is fully engaged working on the UK government's sclerotic IT infrastructure and heading up the Meraki phone technical side for Europe (can't come soon enough).

Cheers

[matthewthorp]

Hi there,

just saw your comment regarding the mulitcast, are you sure that's correct? I believe you can control all policy's via the meraki dashboard? 

[Uberseehandel]

@matthewthorp 

Many premium TV subscription services outside North America use multicast as their distribution vehicle, for such content as live Champions League.

As far as I am aware, and I haven't tried it recently as I have a multi-stack solution in place, Meraki still has not implemented an IGMP-Proxy on its Gateway devices. This requirement is uncommon in Meraki's home market. They have no idea how much business they are missing overseas.