Have learned a ton from people here, so thanks. Now to end my lurk.
Just a more or less basic home networking setup. Total cost (excluding the 4TB HDDs which were donated) worked out to around $400 to replace my router and Synology with beefier components. Power bill is probably the big longterm expense.
The impetus for this was twofold:
- Synology was simply too anemic to do what I needed of it (transcoding DVD rips for the kids, because shutting down access on a schedule is easier via Emby/Plex than via physical DVDs).
- Synology was insufficiently redundant to store my research data.
- Congress recently decided that ISPs can spy on you. So my little Mikrotik router (more reliable than most consumer routers but still a little flaky sometimes) just wasn't going to cut it.
Bought two Dell T3500's off fleaBay, plus some 4GB ECC unreg DIMMS. Both arrived as described. Each around $100. Upgraded the procs to Intel Xeon E5640's for $9 each, which seemed like the sweet spot for performance and power consumption. The FreeNAS box got 24GB, the pfSense box got 4GB RAM. Bought a super cheap Kingwin SSD as the OS drive for pfSense. The FreeNAS box got three thumbdrives as bootdisks ($20), an S3500 as a ZIL ($30), Intel dual Gigabit NIC ($15), and 4x4 TB WD Purples in RAIDZ2 (thought about RAID10 but wanted improved redundancy over speed).
Before you tell me I don't need a ZIL, my research is database-heavy and definitely benefits from it. Will likely add a ~100GB SSD L2ARC as well.
pfSense is setup to OpenVPN all traffic except the Roku.
FreeNAS runs Emby for music and DVD rips.
From top to bottom, left to right:
Plans:
- Setup backups to Nextcloud and other data to Backblaze. Stage Synology at a distant family member's and backup to it as well via encrypted rsync.
- Set up Snort better for improved IDS
- Better cable management!
- Carve out Amazon Prime and Netflix traffic from the VPN. Right now this is just by IP and family has been very tolerant.
- VLANs to partition off the guest network from the home network
- Performance tuning on FreeNAS to get it to saturate GbE (right now it will saturate via iPerf, but FTP upload speeds max at 30 Megabytes per second, FTP downloads peak at 25MB/s each, but four in parallel will saturate for a minute then slow down), then upgrade my work PC->FreeNAS link to 10GbE or Infiniband
- When I'm done with school, will likely build an industrial version of this setup for my office (rackmounted, redundant. FreeNAS box with much RAM for L1ARC, virtualization server with serious RAM for big regressions and GPU for ML).
Just a more or less basic home networking setup. Total cost (excluding the 4TB HDDs which were donated) worked out to around $400 to replace my router and Synology with beefier components. Power bill is probably the big longterm expense.
The impetus for this was twofold:
- Synology was simply too anemic to do what I needed of it (transcoding DVD rips for the kids, because shutting down access on a schedule is easier via Emby/Plex than via physical DVDs).
- Synology was insufficiently redundant to store my research data.
- Congress recently decided that ISPs can spy on you. So my little Mikrotik router (more reliable than most consumer routers but still a little flaky sometimes) just wasn't going to cut it.
Bought two Dell T3500's off fleaBay, plus some 4GB ECC unreg DIMMS. Both arrived as described. Each around $100. Upgraded the procs to Intel Xeon E5640's for $9 each, which seemed like the sweet spot for performance and power consumption. The FreeNAS box got 24GB, the pfSense box got 4GB RAM. Bought a super cheap Kingwin SSD as the OS drive for pfSense. The FreeNAS box got three thumbdrives as bootdisks ($20), an S3500 as a ZIL ($30), Intel dual Gigabit NIC ($15), and 4x4 TB WD Purples in RAIDZ2 (thought about RAID10 but wanted improved redundancy over speed).
Before you tell me I don't need a ZIL, my research is database-heavy and definitely benefits from it. Will likely add a ~100GB SSD L2ARC as well.
pfSense is setup to OpenVPN all traffic except the Roku.
FreeNAS runs Emby for music and DVD rips.
From top to bottom, left to right:
- Synology DS112
- HP ProCurve 1810G-8
- Unifi AP-LR (off to the left of the picture you can see the PoE cable feeding it; injector is hidden behind the switch)
- APC UPS 650V for FreeNAS box (getting a second to power the pfSense through the brief outages we seem to get once a month)
- FreeNAS box
- pfSense box
- Cable modem
Plans:
- Setup backups to Nextcloud and other data to Backblaze. Stage Synology at a distant family member's and backup to it as well via encrypted rsync.
- Set up Snort better for improved IDS
- Better cable management!
- Carve out Amazon Prime and Netflix traffic from the VPN. Right now this is just by IP and family has been very tolerant.
- VLANs to partition off the guest network from the home network
- Performance tuning on FreeNAS to get it to saturate GbE (right now it will saturate via iPerf, but FTP upload speeds max at 30 Megabytes per second, FTP downloads peak at 25MB/s each, but four in parallel will saturate for a minute then slow down), then upgrade my work PC->FreeNAS link to 10GbE or Infiniband
- When I'm done with school, will likely build an industrial version of this setup for my office (rackmounted, redundant. FreeNAS box with much RAM for L1ARC, virtualization server with serious RAM for big regressions and GPU for ML).
