At a crossroads here…
Perhaps you saw the last post about upgrading the WiFi card on my desktop’s new motherboard? Well, about a week or two later, I finally ran and fished Cat6 from the server/router to my desk. So now I’ve got solid 1000 MB Ethernet… for now. I think 10 GB would be great, and eBay has plenty of cheap high-end cards from the likes of Intel, Chelsio, and Mellanox (NVIDIA). They’re cheap too — $12 to $20 per card kind of cheap. With a pair of cards, I can do 10 gigabit between my desktop and my server.
The thing is, I’ve only got 100/1000 MB switches. That’s okay though. I’m thinking I might take motivation from an old Level1Techs video, The Forbidden Router. ( Link )
If I put a dual 10 GB NIC in the server, I’ll have the Intel GB Ethernet for a WAN interface and then two 10G ports for LAN (the machine itself bridged to that “LAN” interface). That can then feed into my normal switch and WiFi AP.
Two things though:
The Lenovo Tiny PC I’m using has no PCI-E slot. It also only has one SATA port. I want to add an internal 8TB WD hard disk and a couple of 1–2 TB SSDs for network storage. And with 10 gig, why not?! This keeps the extra mess out of my new desktop build. So I’m thinking “NAS/router combo.” I already run virtual machines to keep things separated, and this would just add more benefits by having one well-configured box.
It’d have to be a different box though. I’ve been playing with some used hardware I picked up, which I think will work out nicely for the job of an all-in-one server/router solution (see below). I’m trying out FreeBSD’s bhyve for the first time, and ZFS as well! So far, so good. Will I end up using FreeBSD though? Probably not, but I’m on the fence.
Trying it out has made me realize how comfortable and productive I actually am on Linux… I think it may be wiser to stick with that for the serious stuff I depend on.
To keep things clean and organized