HeBeCb

40 minutes ago, Cyknight said:

Fill your retirement first getting numerous other company types up to speed first.

In the past 3 months alone I've:

-told a 'home spa/sauna' brand to take a hike as they wanted me to ensure the router in use wasn't blocking random IP requests at the WAN port

-told a thermostat designer trying to do a beta on a kickstarter to go back to the drawing board as they expected it to be required to have a full DMZ to their control hub (not just in beta!)

-yelled at a fitness company because they started to rip out an enterprise network (at an actual enterprise!!!) and replace it with some OEM junk to make their equipment work AS PER manufacturer instructions

-hung up on the engineer from a lock manufacturer that kept telling me that to use the hyper-expensive biometric lock they made I had to turn off inbound logging (it exposed their encryption key)....

 

lmao sounds like my current job (software architecture)

Maybe I need a different plan

13 minutes ago, Cyknight said:

No doubt.

maybe this is what I should do when I finally decide to retire

I think the setting up of inter-vlan firewalls will be their sticking point but maybe I'll get a chance to talk to one of their networking guys when I go to their showroom on Thursday.

I can do the networking myself if need be but, I'm throwing $ at this to save myself time and get a quality initial setup. @cdepaola Your point about where to skimp or not is reasonable and while i'm not convinced the 310 is the best value for the money, i'm prepared to invest there to make the integrator's job easier but I'm resistant to just tossing out the perfectly good pfsense box I purchased. Anyway... as I said you make a fair point about keeping my eye on the end product... the dealers seem to have a good local rep and they were brought in by the GC i'm using for my renovation project who i've obviously also decided to trust (but verify... as I've gotten competitive bids from another installer)

If you care, I'll report back on my experience after meeting with the installer again (i'll not give names or my location on the open forum but if you're genuinely interested you can DM me)

We purchased a new house and rather than go the DIY route i've decided to go with a c4 dealer to set us up. I'm ok trading $ for time & a professional setup however I'm evaluating the proposal the dealer made and was wondering about places where I might save a few bucks here and there.

He's pushing an araknis 310 switch and, although it seems a bit pricey, i sounds like a solid unit from what I've read here and it's what they are used to configuring so I'm prepared to go with that. I'm less convinced I need the router he's proposing... I'd rather keep my PFSense firewall and open a door for him to get through to the 310. Also the araknis APs seem a bit pricey for what they offer. I've seen some folks waving people off of the Ubiquiti AP's due to some specific network config requirements. I would expect a quality installer to know enough networking to deal with that properly. Thoughts?