Home Network... Wired? Wireless? Mixed? Fiber?!

eccerr0r

For those who have more than one machine at home, how do you network them?
I'm sure most people have mixed networks now and the phpbb2 polling system is pretty crappy about multiple votes (so you could choose both a wireless and a wired connection) so I'm not going to include one here.

I suspect 802.11ac or 802.11ax is most people's wireless nowadays but have most people converted to 10GbE or are most of your wired interconnect still 1GbE or lower?

I don't have enough good wireless gear and still stuck with 802.11n mostly because the client machines are aging. Most of my wired network is now at 1GbE using unmanaged, fanless, daisy chained 5 and 8 port switches, with a 10/100 segment (using an underutilized 24-port switch as most of my 8 and smaller port 10/100 switches have died) for the slow machines and a little used laser printer.

Now most of my storage is still HDD so 1GbE generally outpaces single SATA disks counting seek times, it doesn't hold a light to RAID0/RAID5, SSDs, and even tmpfs. But 10GbE gear is still a bit too pricey for me, though I did get a pair of 10GbE cards - the switch is the problem and I'm not going to like fan cooling. Was planning to hook up two machines on their own subnet but having a hard time choosing which machines... perhaps the 10GbE cards are simply not ready for primetime until I get that 10GbE switch...

(and other than uplink, anyone networks machines with fiber at home? Or is copper still the way to do it...)
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2023 9:26 am Post subject:

for 10gb you need not only the cards, but the switch (unless only reverse wiring 2 machines directly) AND the cable needs to be able to handle that speed.

Then there's whatever is on either side of the network cards, software, etc, can it handle the speed.

My system is mostly 1gb with a few wireless (android, laptop, etc) and haven't felt the need to upgrade to 10gb because, in my case, not much will benefit from the speed.

Quite frankly, I don't care if it takes a few seconds longer to send/receive normal amounts of data.
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2023 10:03 am Post subject:

eccerr0r,

Trusted devices are all 1G wired on CAT 5e. That's supposed to be able to carry 2.5G too but that's network cards, (PoE) switches and so on.
I probably wouldn't notice the difference.

Untrusted devices are wireless. That's Android, TV, etc. My access point is ac which is more than fast enough.
The BD player is not permitted on the network in its installed location as it does not have Wifi.
The untrusted stuff is firewalled off behind my router.

The ISP connection is VHDL, that 80Mbit down and 20Mbit up (on a good day). The downlink rarely goes much over 60Mbit.
There is very little local traffic via the router, so that hardware is good enough.
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szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3169

Pretty much everything on 1G ethernet + 2.4GHz wifi.
10G is just a fancy number to me, it'll likely be a very very long time till I need a network like that, and 5GHz wifi trades range I do have a use for for speed I don't, so.... Just because it's older technology doesn't necessarily make it worse.

However:

steve_v · Guru Joined: 20 Jun 2004 Posts: 388 Location: New Zealand

Mixed 802.3ab, 802.3an, and 802.11gn.

100/20Mbit fibre uplink, via custom (ipfire) router with 802.11bgn (800mw) AP, openvpn server, TOR node/proxy etc. etc.
Most client machines are 1000BASE-T through 1000/100/10 managed switch, bar 2 old boxes running at 100BASE-T and 10BASE-T respectively.
2 point-to-point (unswitched) 10GBASE-T dedicated NFS links from desktops to fileserver, because 10G cards are cheap and 10G switches are not. Now that those desktops have NVME drives, ~1GB/s to/from the fileserver is quite nice.
A couple of mobile / low-bandwidth clients on 802.11gn, and one SFF box I CBF running a cable to. TBH I don't really have need (or see the point) of a wireless link faster than 802.11n, at least not in a domestic setting.
No IoT junk, smart TVs or other untrusted devices, though a dedicated NIC on the router and standalone AP is available for such.
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Goverp · Advocate Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 2019

Our ISP link is 17 MB - copper wires - and is OK for all our needs. The router provides 300 MB WiFi, and 100 MB Ethernet. So, old school and very slow compared with what's reasonable for a domestic setup, but still much faster than the ISP. We don't really need anything more, mainly because we're not into watching movies on phones. The LAN is only used for printing, scanning and a WebDAV/CalDAV server, and a binpkg server for updating my laptop. I do backups over USB-3, so no need for more bandwidth. emerge --update is still CPU-bound, not limited by bandwidth.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2023 3:13 pm Post subject:

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2023 3:40 pm Post subject:

My daughter is a budding camera buff, so she takes a fair amount of pics.
She puts them on her windows machine, but I do copy them to the backup machine by way of samba,
I use the standard windows robocopy and it doesn't take that long even for gigs of pics/data. The network is 1g.
The copying is going from ssd to usb raid (spinning rust), so transfer is not network bound by any means.

1gb network is pretty fast, unless dealing with 100's of gigs of data.

If doing video creation/editing, I don't see there should be much slowdown unless they're not using local temp storage for the creation/editing.
Faster to do all the work locally and then copy it over.

I'm not an early adopter of technology upgrades, whether network, cpu, machines, etc. I prefer to hardware/firmware/etc stabilize before adopting.
And for my personal uses, I don't need speed over 1gb, at least for now.

Now if the switch dies and I have to replace and the newer/faster ones are near the same prices, it's easy to justify the upgrade.

It's kind of like where I am now, ryzen 3700x, about 3 1/2 years using it, I've looked at upgrading, but when I seriously consider,
I ask myself "do I really need it and am I really going to use the extra speed, capacity, etc"
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2023 4:44 pm Post subject:

pa4wdh · l33t Joined: 16 Dec 2005 Posts: 815

My network is mainly 1Gb/s wired, no wireless at all.

There are three exceptions to the 1Gb/s:
1) My internet link is VDSL2 at 70Mb/s
2) I have a pair of homeplugs for ethernet over powerlines, advertised as many Mbps but typically is around 50Mbps in my situation, which is good enough for my use-case
3) My phones sometimes make use of my network via usb-ethernet which is limited to USB2.0 speeds
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2023 5:56 pm Post subject:

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth doing Ethernet bonding on two 1GbE links as an alternative to running 10GbE so I can transfer files between two machines quickly - at 200MB/sec for two 1GbE links, that should cover my RAID and SSD speeds. Probably not worth the setup/teardown as eventually I'll go back to single link just to simplify things.

Incidentally I wonder for those people that still have self-hosting DDR2 machines to use NBD or something to swap over network to a DDR3/DDR4/DDR5 machine that has much more RAM. Wondering if that would stress the network? Recently been able to get a machine to 32GB RAM and maybe more if I shuffle some DIMMs around, but tempted to get my 8GB DDR2 (hardware limit) server to swap to ramdisk over 1GbE and see how bad that performs even if it needs to thrash swap...
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067