Hi everyone :)
It's time to switch and give my home network a proper minimal hardware upgrade. Right now everything is managed by my ISP's AIO firewall/router combo. Which works okayish, but I'm already doing some firewall/dns/VPN stuff on my minimal spare laptop server to bypass most of my ISP's restrictions. So it's time to get a little bit "crazy" !
While I do have some "power user" knowledge regarding Linux/server/selfhosted services/networking, I'm a bit clueless hardware wise, specially regarding my ISP's 2.5G ethernet port.
I do have a 5giga connection from my Internet provider (Obtic fiber) which is divided into 4 ethernet ports (Eth1 2.5G, Eth2 1G, Eth3 1G, Eth4 0,500G or something in that range). And right now the Eth1 port is connected through an old 1G switch.
- To take full advantage of my ISP's 2.5G ethernet port do I need a router AND a switch capable of 2.5G througput ? Or only the router and the switch is going to divid it accordingly between all connected devices on a 1G switch?
I'm also looking for some recommendation/personal experience for a router and a switch with a budget of 250e.
First I was interested into a BananaPI as a router, to tinker a bit, but it seems a bit of a hassle to flash it with OpenWRT, then I found an interesting post on Lemmy talking about the Intel N100 Celeron N5105, which looks like more what I'm looking for but I'm not sure ?
- I have no idea what's the best bet, a SBC (bananapi mini, orange pi, raspberry pi...) a fully fleged router (like TP-Link AX1800 and flash it with opensense/openwrt) or an Intel N100 Celeron N5105 Soft Router ?
The capabilities I'm looking for:
- VLAN capable
- AP VLAN capabable to segment wifi
- Taking advantage of my ISP's 2.5G ethernet port
- Firewall customization capabilities
I have an eye on a managed switch I found on amazon (SODOLA 6 Port 2.5G Web Managed) but I have no idea how reliable they are, I have never heard of SODOLA.
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Any good recommendation I should look at for a managed switch that would work great with the same capabilities above?
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Probably last question, is regarding wifi APs. Is it possible to make an access point from my router even tough it hasn't atennas? If I connect an access point directly to my router, will it be capable of giving away wifi connection?
Thanks for reading though, I'm a bit unsure how I should spend my money to have a minimal but reliable/capable homelab setup. Every advice is welcome. But keep in mind, I want to keep it minimal, a good enough routing capbability with intermediate firewall customisation. I'm already hosting a few containers with a spare laptop and the traffic isn't going to be to crazy.
before spending any money, just reuse old equipment you have around, even if it wont max out the speed. You can try out openwrt, opnsense, openbsd, linux, etc... deciding which ecosystem you like is very important before you buy hardware!!!! Different devices have different hardware support, etc.
Regarding hardware - Your fiber connection is 5GiB but your ISP cpe only has 2.5GbE ports, so you will need to bond two ports together to get your 5GiB throughput to your router. Once you select your routing environment, you can choose hardware that allows for multiple wan side ports that you can bond. (Perhaps your ISP has a CPE you can get 10GbE out of, or with a spf port, the same for your router)
Regarding Switches - You don't need a fancy managed switch, as long as you trust devices on your network to do peaceful vlaning on their own, you can just send vlan tagged traffic across a dumb switch no problem. Only when you start talking about doing default vlan tagging and enforcement on a per port basis do you need a fancier switch. So depending on what you want to do with vlans, you can save money here.
Regarding Wifi - Depending on your routing solution, it could have wifi attached to it, or you can just get a specific access point on your network that only provides wifi and rely on your router/gateway setup to do all the configuration.
FWIW - I just go full ubiquity, router, switches, ap. I used to fiddle around with openbsd routing, and it was really fun, but life got busy and ubiquiti fills the niche between just works, and letting me get really picky with settings.
Fully agree. Sometimes the best equipment is that which is in-hand and thus free.
A small word of caution: some cheap unmanaged switches rigidly enforce 1500 Byte payload sizes, and if the switch has no clue that 802.1q VLAN tags even exist, will consider the extra 4 bytes as part of the payload. So your workable MTU for tagged traffic could now be 1496 Bytes.
Most traffic will likely traverse that switch just fine, but max-sized 1500 Byte payload frames with a VLAN tag may be dropped or cause checksum errors. Large file transfers tend to use the full MTU, so be aware of this if you see strange issues specific to tagged traffic.