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Rant: I went with a full mesh for our new office and it's been a headache
When we were setting up the network for our new 12,000 sq ft office in Tacoma, I had to choose between a classic hub-and-spoke design or a full mesh topology. Everyone online was screaming about the redundancy benefits of mesh, so I went for it, thinking it was the 'modern' choice. Big mistake, lol. The config complexity for our core switches was insane, and we spent a solid week just trying to get OSPF to behave without causing weird loops. Our junior admin almost quit. The promised 'self-healing' is nice in theory, but troubleshooting is now a nightmare because traffic paths are never the same twice. I'm honestly thinking about ripping half of it out and going back to a simpler layered design. Has anyone else tried a full mesh in a medium-sized office and found it to be more trouble than it's worth?
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drew_west4mo ago
Sounds pretty rough, but is a full mesh really needed for an office that size?
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avery_roberts672mo ago
Oh man, I'd actually say mesh is almost always a good call for an office. Even if it's small, those walls and cubicles kill signal fast, so you're way better off having the coverage baked in.
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allen.quinn2mo ago
Honestly that sounds like a total nightmare, but I gotta ask - were you using something like OSPF in a single area or did you try to split it up? I've heard that flat mesh networks in a medium space can get real ugly real fast if you don't segment the routing domains properly. And what kind of core switches are we talking about here? That might explain a lot of the loop issues you ran into.
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