After installing a new Meraki based network earlier this year for a customer that makes custom cabinets for homes, the owner of the company asked us what we could do for his home office. His home is only a few miles away from the plant, but it is in a rural part of Oklahoma and the only internet access that has been available there is from a local fixed wireless company and/or cellular service. He has been subscribing to the fixed wireless access and they were only able to deliver about 3 to 5 megabits of download speed and less than a megabit of upload speed. A lot of his neighbors are also using the same wireless service from the same tower, so the internet connectivity is poor at best for everyone involved.   Just after we finished installing the new network for the plant, the option to join the Starlink satellite internet beta program became available to order. I suggested to the owner that he sign up immediately for it and he did. He was able to get a Starlink terminal during the summer. We helped him permanently install the dish on the North side of his pool house and the system has worked very well since. I told him that we would also need to install a new wired and wireless network in his pool house and home to take full advantage of the new internet service. Currently the Starlink service provides around 200 megabits of download speed and about 15 to 20 megabits of upload speed. Starlink is projecting that when they have their full satellite constellation in orbit, the download speeds could approach 1 gigabit. So we ordered a new Meraki MX75 firewall to accommodate that potential speed. Since the Starlink service is still in beta and the service can be disrupted by heavy rainfall, we also ordered a new Meraki MG41E cellular gateway and installed it outside directly under the Starlink dish. We connected the ethernet connection from the Starlink system to WAN 1 on the firewall and we connected the MG41E network connection, via a new MA-INJ-6 PoE injector, to WAN 2 on the firewall. To cut down on the cellular usage, we configured the firewall to use the Starlink service as the primary internet connection and only fail-over to the cellular service if Starlink is not available. The MG41E is able to aggregate multiple AT&T LTE frequencies together and provide a very consistent 8 megabits of download speed, despite the rural location. Their was no need for a second cellular provider, but this option could provide even more redundancy if needed. All of the network equipment installed in the pool house is connected to a 650 VA APC BackUPS Pro UPS. The Starlink dish and the cellular gateway are each isolated from the rest of the network by two Ditek DTK-MRJPOE inline ethernet surge protectors. The surge protectors and the pole that the dish and cellular gateway are installed on are all connected to the house ground with 10 gauge solid copper wire. Now that the internet service issues had been resolved, it was time to concentrate on providing the best wireless access possible throughout the property.   Starlink and MG41E MX75   MR36 APs were not available for the timeframe of this project so we ordered four MR44 APs for it. One MR44 AP provided complete wireless coverage for the smaller pool house. The MX75 has two PoE ethernet ports on it and we powered the pool house AP with one of these ports. The home is a standard two story ranch type structure with easy access to the attic area on the second floor. Their is a sidewalk between the pool house and the home and the owner had the foresight to install a conduit under the sidewalk. We installed an outdoor rated Category 6 ethernet cable from the MX75 in the pool house, via the sidewalk conduit, to a Meraki MS120-8FP switch in the AC protected room of the home's second floor. We installed two of the MR44 APs on each end of the first floor of the house and one more MR44 in the middle of the second floor. The MS120-8FP switch and the three MR44 APs are power protected by an APC SCL500RM1UC Lithium-Ion battery UPS. This UPS model has APC's cloud managed Smart-connect feature so that the UPS can be monitored remotely and provide alerts about the status of the electrical power in the house and the status of the UPS. We used a Rackmount.IT kit to install the MS120-8FP switch in a Startech 4U wall mount rack, along with the 24 port patch panel and the UPS. The four MR44 APs provide complete wireless coverage throughout the home and the pool house. MS120-8FP switch MR44 AP   Since the company has an MX67 firewall already installed at their plant, I was able to activate the auto-VPN between it and the MX75 and provide the owner with access to the plant network and the compute resources located there. The owner is thrilled to have high speed internet, complete wireless coverage throughout the property and the ability to securely and reliably access the network at the plant. He and his wife can now work from their home office or at their offices at the plant as needed.   The company financed all of the Meraki network equipment for the plant through Cisco Capital and they added the home office network equipment to the same lease, which was a huge help in successfully selling the project.   Variations of this same solution that combine Cisco Meraki network equipment with Starlink can be installed anywhere that the service is available and opens up many opportunities that did not exist as recently as 2020.   ... View more

Here are some pictures of an MT11 installation with a glycol temperature probe in a walk-in freezer at a local restaurant. The freezer is in the back of the building and their are two concrete walls between the sensor and an MR36 AP and an MV32 camera. The distance is about 30 feet. The wall closest to the AP and camera also has sheet metal on one side of it. There is a hallway through both walls, but it is still a challenging BT wireless connection. I moved the MT11 further away from the probe and in line with the hallway to get the best BT wireless connection that I could and even though the signal strength is not great, it is working reliably. The hardest part of the install was drilling through the freezer wall. I only had a 1/2" drill bit on hand and it was barely long enough to go all the way through the freezer wall. The installation video on the Meraki web site says that you need a 15 millimeter hole to route the sensor cable through, which works out to roughly a 5/8" drill bit. Despite that, the plug end of the sensor fit through the 1/2" hole. Total installation time, including the pre-configuration of the MT11 and software updates was about 45 minutes and about 20 minutes of that time was spent drilling through the wall with a marginally sharp drill bit.    Glycol Probe The temperature probe plugs the hole very well and you can clearly see the probe immersed in the glycol.   MT11   The MT11 is positioned to take advantage of the straight hall way path to the AP and the camera. I did fill in the hole in the freezer wall with some silicone sealant too. The adhesive cable clamps would not stick to the metal walls of the freezer but they would stick to the fiberglass on the support beam. I used the provided magnet to attach the MT11 to the metal wall.   Dashboard view   The freezer goes through a semi-defrost cycle every six hours. The temperature never gets above 22F and generally stays around 12F. The temperature graph on the dashboard view clearly shows this. The RSSI is not great, but the connection is stable with no problems. Another quality Cisco Meraki product! ... View more

I found a need to create a portable WIFI solution that is easy to setup, easy to take down and only needs AC power and reliable cellular service. The use case is for temporary events, both indoors and outdoors, where WIFI is needed for devices like Point-Of-Sale registers, digital tickets, digital signage and general internet access. Some of the possible events are farmers markets, little league tournaments, food truck courts and golf tournaments.   I used some off-the-shelf television antenna tri-pod mounts and masts as the platform to mount the equipment on. They are cheap, light-weight, durable and easy to transport.   Base station   I needed a water proof enclosure to house the PoE switch. I used a Ventev climate controlled cabinet that I had from another project. The cabinet has an AC outlet built in along with a small fan to vent it. I removed the heating element from the cabinet as the switch will keep it warm. I used an APC surge protector to provide some power protection for the electronics. I used a small, cheap, unmanaged, 8 port 100 megabit PoE+ industrial grade network switch. The switch also has a single gigabit non-PoE port. I would have used an 8 port MS120 switch, but I was concerned about it's environmental specifications and size. The other Meraki devices provide plenty of visibility into the local network.   Inside the Base Station   I had an extra MT10 Temperature and Humidity Sensor that I put in the cabinet. The fan is drawing heat from the cabinet out of the top inlet. This means ambient air is being drawn in to the cabinet from the bottom inlet. So the MT10 is measuring the outside air temperature and humidity. So this system also functions as a rather expensive weather station too.   Base Station fan and air filters   I installed a small outlet box on the bottom of the cabinet and used a 6 port RJ45 plate for it. I wired one of the ports (blue jack) to the gigabit port and 5 more ports (white jacks) to the 100 megabit PoE ports. This is the only part of the project that is not weather-proof. The gigabit port could be connected to a local broadband internet circuit if it were available. I do not plan to the leave the system out in the weather for extended periods of time, so this was an acceptable solution.   Network ports I choose to go with the external network ports so that it would be easy to connect and disconnect network devices to the base station without having to open the cabinet. The network jacks and wire are all Category 6, although 5E would work too.   MG21E Cellular Gateway   I installed a Meraki MG21E Cellular Gateway on top of the base station to provide internet access. When the new Starlink satellite internet service is available, I could remove the MG21E and install the Starlink dish on top of the poll.   MR86 Wireless Access Point   I used a Meraki MR86 WIFI 6 Outdoor Wireless Access Point for the WIFI access. I realize the MR86 is overkill for this project and the MR76 would be a better choice, but the MR86 APs were in stock and the MR76 APs were not. An MR70 AP would also be an even cheaper option.   Ventev Wireless Patch Antenna   I went with the Ventev micro patch antenna to direct the wireless network coverage towards a specific area. All four leads are dual band and the antenna is much smaller and cheaper than a pair of the Meraki patch antennas. The patch antenna could also be replaced with an omni-directional dome antenna for a wider coverage area.   Secondary AP for additional coverage   I setup an additional station to provide better coverage for larger events. It draws power and internet from the base station. I used the same AP and antenna for it. I can theoretically run four of these from the base station, as long as they are within 300 feet or so. I could also power the additional stations with a PoE injector and rely on the Meraki Wireless Mesh access to.   I added some firewalls rules to the wireless SSID to block bandwidth consuming services like file-sharing, peer-to-peer and web advertisements. I used traffic shaping to limit the wireless users to two megabits of bandwidth. This should be sufficient for most users and allowances can be made if more bandwidth is needed.   You can grant access to the wireless network through multiple different methods. My favorite one to use is Facebook authentication. The wireless users have to "like" you business or organization page in order to use the wireless network.   I hope you enjoyed this project post!     ... View more

We recently completed the installation of a full suite of Meraki sensors and video surveillance of a medium sized data center. The data center has a single chilled water cooling system.   They had been using an old Sensaphone monitoring system to monitor the temperature and water leaks. The system was very unreliable and cumbersome to use.   We installed an MT10 sensor to monitor the temperature and humidity, an MT12 to monitor water leaks from the chilled water system and an MT20 to monitor the single door access into the data center.   We set alerts for both high and low temperatures and humidity levels, water leaks and if the door to the data center was left open for more than a few minutes. We originally installed the water leak sensor so that it was in contact with the concrete floor. Even though the floor was dry, the drain for the condensate from the cooling system was about 8 inches away from the sensor. Their must have been enough moisture in the floor that it was intermittently tripping the sensor. We raised the sensor just a fraction of an inch off the floor and the false alarms stopped. The sensor must be very sensitive to detect moisture on what looks like a dry floor.   We installed two MV32 360 degree cameras to monitor the open areas of the data center and installed an MV12W camera to monitor an area behind the main network equipment racks, which is where the chilled water system is installed. We used the telescoping pendant mounts for the two MV32 cameras and the wall mount for the MV12W. The cameras serve as the BLE gateway for the sensors. Each sensor was able to connect to all three cameras from anywhere in the room.    We connected the MT10 and MT12 sensors to the optional AC power supplies and also installed the batteries in all of the sensors, just to insure complete up time.   The customer went from having no visibility into the data center to being able to see everything in it, as well as remotely view the temperature and humidity, track the number of times the data center was accessed and know who it was and be alerted if there are any water leaks or cooling system failures.   MV32 #1 MV32 #2 MV12W MT20 Door Sensor MT10 Temperature and Humidity Sensor MT12 Water Leak Detection Sensor ... View more

It looks like many of the Meraki products are affected by the DNSpooq vulnerabilities, but the latest software versions have been patched to fix them.   https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-dnsmasq-dns-2021-c5mrdf3g     ... View more

Here is a summary of a network replacement project that we just completed. This customer makes custom cabinets for homes here in Oklahoma. They have experienced exceptional growth during the pandemic as people travel less and invest more in their homes. They had an antiquated network infrastructure that consisted of a Dell SonicWall firewall, several un-managed Netgear switches, several EnGenius and Linksys APs and no power protection. They also had an ancient NEC key system with the LCD displays on most of the analog phones non-functional. They had most of their network equipment installed in a cabinet in the filthy manufacturing area, where they are running many saws and sanders. Needless to say, their is saw dust and cobwebs everywhere in this area. We installed a new APC 13U cabinet for the MDF in the air-conditioned office area of the company and installed all new Category 6 cabling, patch panels, wall plates and jumpers. We installed an MX67 firewall and MS120-48FP switch in the MDF. Their is an APC SMT1000RM2U UPS with Smart Connect cloud monitoring to power protect the network equipment in the cabinet from Oklahoma's sometimes violent thunderstorms. We installed a new APC 6U wall mount cabinet for the IDF. We installed an MS120-24P switch and an APC Short Depth 500 VA Lithium Ion UPS with Smart Connect in the IDF cabinet. There are 2 one gigabit cables in an LACP Trunk between the MDF and the IDF switches. We installed 4 MR36 APs in the office and warehouse areas to provide WIFI6 coverage throughout the entire facility. We installed a new Cisco WebEx Calling system with 8800 series phones and ported the phone numbers over to it. We connected a Cisco ATA191 with an analog port to a Viking Electronics RAD-1A and PA-30 paging amplifier and installed three new 300AE paging horns for clear paging capability throughout the warehouse area. The synchronous 50 megabit internet connection is provided by AT&T fiber. Before the network replacement, even with the reliable fiber internet, the internet connectivity would waiver frequently. Now it is perfect. Spotty to no WIFI coverage is now excellent throughout the facility. Garbled phone conversations and paging are now crystal clear. The customer went from having little to no visibility or alerting into the functioning of the network and phone system to complete visibility with real-time monitoring and alerts. This is what a modern network and phone infrastructure can look like 21 years into the 21st Century. Previous network equipment and phone system New MDF cabinet New MX67 and MS120-48FP New paging system New IDF cabinet New MS120-24P New MR36 WIFI6 AP ... View more