> the owner is currently paying $1500 a month for this internet service
> three Poe HPE 48 port switches
> a facility with about 75 rooms
> each business (band, pr, etc) has a single room, so one business will only have access to 1 or two ports
This is looking like a BIG job. Not a spare-time job, at least at first.
The fiber costs $18k/year. Switches last 5 years so your $350 investment costs-out at $70/year, 0.4% of the elephant in the building. This may be a Good Deal; they are good switches and you don't need latest/greatest, and those who do often tag-sale their old boxen cheap. But you can't penny-pinch your way to complete happiness justifying a $18k/yr ongoing cost.
You have more ports than I did when I was Systems Administrator. And fiscally I only had "one client" (3 departments in one university); you have ~~70 clients who may not all play nice together. (The dept Chairs or Dean could sort-out disputes better than a Landlord who needed rent-money.)
You can't run a "business" on 1-2 ports. Yes, some of these bands are not "real businesses" like a doctor or an accounting firm. But 4 guys in a band, a lover for each, plus a couple printers, is peak 10 devices.
However Wi-Fi rules today, so 2 ports per room is maybe two more than will be used. (Kids don't know what an ethernet hole is.) Wi-Fi will be *demanded*. It would be absurd to have 25 "per tenant" Wi-Fi boxes in one wing (but this WILL happen if the landlord doesn't do it). There are mass-WiFi boxes for schools and motels; this is not something I have done. I could physically locate a wall-port and deal with an offender; a Wi-Fi bad apple is harder to track.
Your short-term job needs much more wire-work than I ever did (installation was done "by others").
You will have bad apples. High-traffic servers inside the net. Machines infested with viruses. Much of my hair was lost when network central reported such problems to me and I had to track-down the offender and fix the problem. You don't even have any such monitoring (excess or suspicious traffic).
You clearly have only slight background in IT management. That's OK, many of us were thrown in the fire under-prepared.
My job grew from fixing audio to fixing a dozen+ isolated PCs to managing a hundred ports. I looked at what I was doing against what I was paid for my legacy duties and fought hard for a $13k/year raise in pay and title (even the whoremasters in Personnel agreed this was justified). While I know _you_ will do it "for art", the time and learning-curve distracts from doing your own art. *Fight for fair money!* This may be money for you to do drudge-work and panic-response, or money to hire an IT person, and of course money for *good* gear that does not fight you or fall out of the ceiling. $11.11/port is absurd. I was allowing $100/port/year for maintaining things, between my pay and incidental upgrades. Long-term upgrades would double that (but such projects were above my pay-grade and annual budget).
