Bridging Downside ?

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Allan74

Member
May 15, 2019
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First off, hello. While attempting to find some info on what I am trying to accomplish, I was left with more questions than when I began, so I thought I would just stop and ask for a bit of advice.

I am looking to shrink my setup and consolidate things into the least number of physical boxes possible, while adding a 10Gbe link from my main PC to my Media Server. While I know that my 'to buy' list currently consists of 2x 10Gbe cards and media, THAT is where I want to draw the line and actually remove an existing Gigabit switch from the equation, rather than upgrade to an SFP+ capable unit.

I have a large collection of spare components and would simply like to throw enough NICs into my Media Server, feed it from my modem/router, Bridge and run connections from there, including feeding my main PC with the single 10Gbe link from that Media Server to satisfy my connection to the network and internet.

My connection requirements are very minimal, as in-house Wifi takes care of anyone that isn't ME and the only resource I need to make available is simply a Media Server (referred to in this post), is there going to be any real tragic downside to going this route ?

While I am familiar enough with Esxi, I would prefer to completely give up on life and use a Windows Box.
The current server board has Dual Gigabit NICs and I would just add a Quad Gigabit NIC and a 10Gbe NIC.
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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So, this would remove all network switching and routing and put it on the one server? You can do that, the reason I wouldn't is that you lose a lot if that one box has a problem at some point, which always happens eventually.

The entire LAN, goes down, so no network printing etc.. I use a lot of services on the LAN, so this is huge for me.

Internet access, though you could plug directly into the WAN if you need to. Lack of internet can make diagnosis more painful.

Increased CPU use as the server now has to be a CPU based switch. It's likely not a huge issue if your server is remotely decent. But local CPU loading can increase LAN latency and such. 10Gb makes this worse.

So I choose to use a switch and a separate firewall/router. This way, that stuff is available even should the main server go down. Which also helps keep the family happy as even if our local media server goes down, they can still hit Netflix or similar.
 

Blinky 42

Active Member
Aug 6, 2015
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PA, USA
You can always just get the 10G link in place between your 2 servers as point to point on a different network and make sure you mount the filesystems/route other traffic to the media server over the 10G link while keeping the existing 1G network in place as-is.
As @ttabbal mentioned the main drawback of doing a software switch on one of your primary servers is promoting it to a huge single point of failure. If you convert it to a windows box also, think of how often windows feels like rebooting because it wants to, and apply that unexpected downtime to all devices in your network instead of just that box.

That said, it is totally possible but will probably be more annoying for all than a dedicated 10G point to point or a small 10G + 1G switch.
 

Allan74

Member
May 15, 2019
132
13
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This all began as me not wanting to run multiple network connections from my main workstation to media server & network, but I can see that I am over-complicating things by adding points of failure, so I will just run a stand alone 10G P2P link until I am ready to invest into a Microtik 4+1 or something else affordable to bridge my 1G and 10G requirements.

It's funny how many of us were in the same boat only 15-odd years ago combining 100Mb and 1G....... It's a full circle world.