From the course: CompTIA Network+ (N10-009) Cert Prep

SOHO vs. enterprise

From the course: CompTIA Network+ (N10-009) Cert Prep

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SOHO vs. enterprise

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- So first of all, let me pardon you for the noise 'cause I've got some pretty heavy metal sitting here. And I want to talk about the idea of SOHO versus enterprise routers. Now, if we talk about a SOHO router, we talk about little devices like this. First of all, this is a router, but it's going to be a gateway router. It's going to have one connection to the internet service provider, and then it's going to have a single connection to your network. Now if you take a look at this guy, you'll notice that he's got like four connections here. The reason he has these connections is not because the router has all these connections. What's happening here is this is a two-port router with a built-in switch. And that way it's easy, you don't have to go buy a switch, you can just plug right into this 'cause it comes with both a router and a switch built into it, even though we still just call it a router. Also a SOHO device like this, most of these come with a built-in wireless access point. So these also come with 802.11. And that's where the problem comes in, folks. This little box right here is a router, and it's a switch, and it's a wireless access point, and it's got a bunch of software features on it, like a built in firewall, built in DHCP server, all kinds of other stuff like this. And this is what people think a router is. Well, that's not a router. This my friends, is a router. What we're looking at here is a Cisco router that's designed for more robust, more enterprise situations. When we talk about a router like this, it is a router, most certainly that, but it's going to have at least two connections, and often has many more. Can we look on the back of this guy a little bit? If you look here, you'll see all of these slots here. I can take these out and I can add more connections. So it's easy for me to make a router with three, four, or five, 24 different connections to other routers, whatever I need it to do. So this is a much more robust type situation. It's physically more powerful. A big thing that we see with these types of enterprise routers is that it has good powerful power supplies, often redundant power supplies. It's made out of steel, which makes a difference. The components are more robust. This is a kind of box that you put on a rack and you let it run for three years and you never think about it. I mean, that's the goal of a real router. The other thing about a router like this in an enterprise, it's not going to have wireless, it just doesn't happen. If you need wireless, we've got episodes where we're going to talk about enterprise-level wireless and you can check some of that out, but you're not going to see this. There is no switch built into this. If you want to switch, go stack a switch right on top of this and plug into it, do whatever you need to do. The bandwidth on a router like this is 10, 20, 100 times stronger than on this little box. This little box can support, well, this particular one, in my opinion, can support maybe five or six computers. And that's great, but this box right here could support two or 300 computers, and nobody slows down. So it's important to get an idea of the feel of that. The other thing is that a enterprise router is going to have features that you don't see on a SOHO router. In other episodes, we'll cover things like dynamic routing protocols and things like that. This guy is designed to handle that type of stuff. This little fella really isn't. Again, he's just designed for you to plug into your local ISP and have a few computers running. Now, interestingly enough, this guy will often have features that a guy like this doesn't have. For example, this will have a very customizable firewall. This guy will have some firewall features, and I'm going to show it to you. But a lot of times what we do in a enterprise environment is we get another box that just does firewalling and they can do a much more powerful job. The other thing I want to show you, and this is kind of interesting, is that most of these little SOHO routers will have some kind of web interface. So we plug into it and we type in 192.168.1.1, whatever, and we type in username and password, and we have these lovely user interfaces, which we show in many episodes throughout this series. Boxes like this tend to not have web interfaces. There are entire structures of certifications, like from Cisco for example, that are nothing more than you learning how to use this particular box. So what I'm going to do right now is we're going to just give you the quickest peak of what it looks like on the inside of a enterprise router like this. So what I've done is I've actually programmed one of the ports on this router with an IP address. And what I've done over here is I'm running a program called PuTTY, which we see in other episodes, and I'm going to PuTTY into this, and we're going to just take a look at the configuration. So let's go ahead and log in PuTTY. Now, I've had this all set up, and you can see that's the IP address that I programmed into that port. And it's admin, and the super secret password, which I'm not going to say on camera. Okay, that, what you're looking at right there, folks, is the interface, it's a command line. What we're looking at here is the very, very famous Cisco IOS, that is, man, if you want to work with Cisco routers, you have to learn this very, I don't want to say archaic, but not the easiest operating system to learn. This is not a command line like you'll see in Linux. This is not a command line like you'll see in a Windows PowerShell. It's its own language, its own nomenclature, but the only thing that IOS has in common with something like a Linux terminal is you type something and hit Enter. Anyway, the only thing I really want to show you right now, and because I know some of these commands, I'm going to show you what's called the running configuration. So let's go ahead and hit this. Now, this thing goes on for like 200 lines. So what we're going to do is I'm just going to march through a couple of the more interesting things that you might want to take a look at. So here's an example. What I've done here is I've set up a domain name. I told it where the DNS server is. So that's some of the information you'll see there. I've got some IPV6 configurations set up. Here is a certificate, because I'm actually logging in through SSH. SSH requires a certificate, so we had to store one on this router and there you can actually see it right there, all those blocks of hexadecimal values. Here's where some of the interesting stuff takes place. Do you see where it says interface? There's an interface loop back, and here's the interface that says FastEthernet 0/0. This is a very Cisco nomenclature of how it identifies the different ports on a system. So what I want to look at is FastEthernet 0/1. So right here, we can see this guy, you see that address? I program that in, I actually had to type commands here and say, you know, "Set the interface, IP =, and then type in these values." So yeah, there's no pretty mouse clicking graphics here, folks, you got to do all this manually. I've also set this up as a VPN. If you're unfamiliar with VPNs, don't worry, we've got episodes to cover virtual private networks. And this actually is all configured to handle the VPN type stuff. So that is a quick and dirty look at the very, very intense world of enterprise routers. If you ever want to be good at this stuff, take a look at things like the Cisco CCNA and CCNP certifications, 'cause that's really all this stuff is about, is learning how to tell these guys to do things. So this is a basic kind of idea of what we're going to see when we separate the world of enterprise from SOHO. But what is most important more than anything else is that whether it's a little tiny plastic box or a multi-thousand dollar metal box, they're still routers, they still route data between different segments to get your data wherever you need it to go.

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