Home Networking as a Hobby Gone Crazy

[amirm]

I bought a USB-C 2.5G no name ethernet adapter for next to nothing on Amazon. Plug it and no matter what I do, it won't go beyond Gigabit. So I bought another from a real networking company, Trendnet, and it worked like a charm. It was twice as much. Well, it was $20. I just ordered a PCIe card for my desktop machine. Will see if it works or is another fake adapter....

 

[Randyman...]

I have read that these adapters can get a little toasty, especially the ones with the older (non-B) chipset. I have secured mine to the back of my Synology in the middle of one of the exhaust fans to give it some airflow.

I had similar concerns - especially seeing the 2.5Gig PCIe x1 cards have heatsinks on them! I was very surprised with its sustained performance. It's an Asus branded one - so might have thermals a bit more under control than the AliExpress ones? In any regard - having one handy has been nice!

 

[Berwhale]

Indeed, so some of the listings for these USB NICs are a little ambiguous about the speeds they support. I went for one which specified the chipset which I knew was 2.5G and was supported by the Synology drivers I linked to.

 

[Berwhale]

I had similar concerns - especially seeing the 2.5Gig PCIe x1 cards have heatsinks on them! I was very surprised with its sustained performance. It's an Asus branded one - so might have thermals a bit more under control than the AliExpress ones? In any regard - having one handy has been nice!

If is it's the Asus NIC I'm thinking off, it has the same RTL chipset as the ones I bought (it's on the compatibility list for the Synology RTL drivers). I like Asus kit, I've used it for decades, but the Asus NIC was 3x the cost of the no-name NICs on AliExpress and it seemed worth a punt on them.

 

[Randyman...]

If is it's the Asus NIC I'm thinking off, it has the same RTL chipset as the ones I bought (it's on the compatibility list for the Synology RTL drivers). I like Asus kit, I've used it for decades, but the Asus NIC was 3x the cost of the no-name NICs on AliExpress and it seemed worth a punt on them.

It's a $29 USB-C2500 from 2021 with a RTL8156B - when 2.5Gig was just becoming "all the rage" at a time when nothing had 2.5Gig onboard yet I was genuinely astonished it saturated the 2.5Gig connection for almost a whole day w/o any issues - and was even more surprised that TrueNAS worked with a USB LAN adapter at all! It was actually that adapter in my primary NAS that lit the fuse on the entire "network refresh" to a more capable Ubiquity router and switch a few years ago, and the recent utilization of the two 10Gig SFP+ ports on that switch just a few weeks ago..

 

[bluefuzz]

That USB adapter stayed saturated above 260MB/s during 12TB of transfers

To think it is but thirty years ago this year I downloaded my first 'big' file from the Internet: a whopping seven whole megabytes! It took ten hours and filled almost a quarter of my harddisk ...

 

[audio_tony]

The cost of running a homelab of that scale would be exorbitant here in the UK.

About 12 years ago this was our 'homelab' (I use the term loosely!).

Both my sons and I all work in IT so a setup like this was inevitable. A year or so after this, the rack had 3 HP 1U servers and Dell 2U - the consumption was pegged at 1kW 24x7 - fortunately electriciy here was cheap back then, but not any more...

IT: Home server rack

IT: Home server rack

gtkc.net

 

[Phorize]

That's a lot of money to spend to end up with the same end user benefit as a modest home/small business solution.

 

[Petrushka]

To think it is but thirty years ago this year I downloaded my first 'big' file from the Internet: a whopping seven whole megabytes! It took ten hours and filled almost a quarter of my harddisk ...

I’m so old I remember being horrified that a Visual Basic development system took 50 megs.

Now I have trivial phone apps that take that much space.

 

[keithm55]

Ooops I guess my home network was a bit of a hobby that got out of hand a bit. Let's see if I can justify my madness....

My house is a u shaped single story house that was built in the early 1930's. All the thick stucco/plaster walls are supported by wire mesh (so it is a set of Faraday shielded rooms). The rooms all have open beam ceilings and there is no basement or crawl space. When I had the house restored I had to replace the failing knob and tube electrical wiring (and failing plumbing), I ran a lot of ethernet to every room (I did this on the weekends during construction). I also have 5 small access points (direct wired to a POE switch as a mesh will not work) for phones etc. Since this is a "historic" house I was forced to hide most "modern" technology from view. Thus I had to locate the "ugly" access points inside closets ( spent a lot of time adjusting orientation, channel assignments and power levels to work around the very effective wall shielding).
My network wiring is good for 10GbE (I sweep certified every link). I am running 1 GbE at the moment to everything except the top level switch which is running 2.5GbE where the access points and the router is connected. The switches are interconnected with multiple 10Gb sfp+ copper cables (so there is ~full bandwidth between switches). The rack is supported by two UPS's. I have two synology nas boxes with 4TB SSD's. The rack is silent (the fans in the NAS never run, I use SSD's), and the only other fans are in the UPS's that only run whenever there is a power outage.
I got a real good deal on a set of TP-link omada devices and I have a lot of capacity for 2.5 Gb expansion when I need it. When you have multiple access points, having a controller for network managment (the device at top of rack) and handling rapid seamless roaming without dropouts really helps (it really does work). I was concerned about security, so there is a opnsense router (not TP-link) that is running a full suite of network security services that I know exactly what is going on. There is also a raspberry pi running pihole for dns/dhcp (and dns filtering).

 

[pablolie]

Ooops I guess my home network was a bit of a hobby that got out of hand a bit. Let's see if I can justify my madness....

My house is a u shaped single story house that was built in the early 1930's. All the thick stucco/plaster walls are supported by wire mesh (so it is a set of Faraday shielded rooms). The rooms all have open beam ceilings and there is no basement or crawl space. When I had the house restored I had to replace the failing knob and tube electrical wiring (and failing plumbing), I ran a lot of ethernet to every room (I did this on the weekends during construction). I also have 5 small access points (direct wired to a POE switch as a mesh will not work) for phones etc. Since this is a "historic" house I was forced to hide most "modern" technology from view. Thus I had to locate the "ugly" access points inside closets ( spent a lot of time adjusting orientation, channel assignments and power levels to work around the very effective wall shielding).
My network wiring is good for 10GbE (I sweep certified every link). I am running 1 GbE at the moment to everything except the top level switch which is running 2.5GbE where the access points and the router is connected. The switches are interconnected with multiple 10Gb sfp+ copper cables (so there is ~full bandwidth between switches). The rack is supported by two UPS's. I have two synology nas boxes with 4TB SSD's. The rack is silent (the fans in the NAS never run, I use SSD's), and the only other fans are in the UPS's that only run whenever there is a power outage.
I got a real good deal on a set of TP-link omada devices and I have a lot of capacity for 2.5 Gb expansion when I need it. When you have multiple access points, having a controller for network managment (the device at top of rack) and handling rapid seamless roaming without dropouts really helps (it really does work). I was concerned about security, so there is a opnsense router (not TP-link) that is running a full suite of network security services that I know exactly what is going on. There is also a raspberry pi running pihole for dns/dhcp (and dns filtering).

Wow. Love the U shape of the place with the inside patio! That's a LOT of Ethernet cable! Are those Sonos players at the bottom?

 

[Petrushka]

Wow. Love the U shape of the place with the inside patio! That's a LOT of Ethernet cable! Are those Sonos players at the bottom?

I’d try getting a good WIFI router and put it on the patio. My needs are simple. I have a lot of devices. two TVs, five Sonos devices, and no problems using an eero mesh.

I sympathize with the Faraday cage house. That was my last house. A long tube, and all room to room wifi blocked.

 

[JP]

I bought a USB-C 2.5G no name ethernet adapter for next to nothing on Amazon. Plug it and no matter what I do, it won't go beyond Gigabit. So I bought another from a real networking company, Trendnet, and it worked like a charm. It was twice as much. Well, it was $20. I just ordered a PCIe card for my desktop machine. Will see if it works or is another fake adapter....

The Apple 1GbE USB-C adapter can’t do a gig. IIRC, around 600Mb.

 

[pablolie]

The Apple 1GbE USB-C adapter can’t do a gig. IIRC, around 600Mb.

In my environment, the *only* app that pushes the network occasionally a tiny bit over 1 Gbps is the nightly internal backup(s). Probably a CPU limitation but I haven't looked into it (it's plenty fast :-D). I am "2.5G ready", but I am not even remotely sure what would push things that way. The average utilization is ridiculously low.

Internet-wise, Comcast for now tops out at 800-900Gbps. And I don't foresee ever needing more (I live by myself).

 

[JP]

In my environment, the *only* app that pushes the network occasionally a tiny bit over 1 Gbps is the nightly internal backup(s). Probably a CPU limitation but I haven't looked into it (it's plenty fast :-D). I am "2.5G ready", but I am not even remotely sure what would push things that way. The average utilization is ridiculously low.

Internet-wise, Comcast for now tops out at 800-900Gbps. And I don't foresee ever needing more (I live by myself).

We don’t have public sewer or water, but they brought fiber in a couple years ago. I have 1Gb service, but 7Gb is available. Use iCloud on all the devices plus some sharing via Dropbox, etc. I love that I can transfer to the cloud and back faster than my local spinning-disk NAS.

 

[keithm55]

Wow. Love the U shape of the place with the inside patio! That's a LOT of Ethernet cable! Are those Sonos players at the bottom?

Thanks, the courtyard is great (this is San Diego, so it is good to use for most of the year). Yup those are sonos AMPs at the bottom. They connect to in-wall speakers for background music (parties etc). Having them hardwired (the wifi is turned off) makes multi-room playback work perfectly all the time.

 

[keithm55]

I’d try getting a good WIFI router and put it on the patio. My needs are simple. I have a lot of devices. two TVs, five Sonos devices, and no problems using an eero mesh.

I sympathize with the Faraday cage house. That was my last house. A long tube, and all room to room wifi blocked.

The house was built during the "great depression" after the stock market crash, so my guess is that a lot of building materials must have been hard to get. The wire mesh in the walls is much finer that typical "chicken wire" used in this application. I have an AP in the courtyard (to cover it) and on the other side of any courtyard facing wall that AP's signal for 5 GHz is -90 dBm and 2.5 GHz is -78dBm. With family members trying to watch HD video on ipads/phones from all over the house (including walking room to room) and far away from the courtyard, one wifi router in the courtyard would not work. There is too much signal loss to feed mesh devices in the house from the courtyrad. We heavily depend on wifi calling for the phones as the cell reception in the house is zero bars (outside it is 4-5 bars).

Mesh does not work here as room to room inside wifi is typically about -70dBm and the multiple hops to go from one leg of the house to the other really add up especially when hop to hop bandwidth is very low (due to low signal levels). I tried it and it was really poor and there were lots of dead spots. Using multiple small non-mesh AP's eliminated all the deadspots and I have -40 dBm or better everywhere and internet download bandwidth (5 GHz) is 800 Mb or better (I have 1 Gb broadband).

 

[gfinlays]

Also, he says he has 'dual fibre WAN' whilst pointing at two copper cables

He will have, but the interfaces to the ISP's GPON ONT unit will be 10 GbE copper. The ISPs GPON ONT uses beam-splitting internally to Tx/Rx on a single fibre at different wavelengths (usually 1490 nm/1310 nm). You can't directly connect a fibre capable router (SFP/SFP+) to the ISP's fibre.

 

[pablolie]

He will have, but the interfaces to the ISP's GPON ONT unit will be 10 GbE copper. The ISPs GPON ONT uses beam-splitting internally to Tx/Rx on a single fibre at different wavelengths (usually 1490 nm/1310 nm). You can't directly connect a fibre capable router (SFP/SFP+) to the ISP's fibre.

I didn't go through the entire thing, but the fact remains no home network will ever require such a setup. A home lab does, a typical home network that caters to an even ambitioned hobbyist will not. Just adds more points of failure and resource contention as well as security holes - and more complication in trying to fix things when those arise. I remember a job certification I did... the hands on test was basically about setting up a relatively complex environment. When that worked you were asked to leave and someone would mess things up. Then you were asked step in to fix it and make it work again. Ugh.

But I guess different strokes for different folks - I love to solve NYT Games as an intellectual challenge, others seemingly like to debug their home network all the time.

 

[gfinlays]

I didn't go through the entire thing, but the fact remains no home network will ever require such a setup. A home lab does, a typical home network that caters to an even ambitioned hobbyist will not. Just adds more points of failure and resource contention - and more complication in trying to fix things when those arise.

But I guess different strokes for different folks - I love to solve NYT Games as an intellectual challenge, others seemingly like to debug their home network all the time.

It's a whole lot of overkill to be fair.