I’m looking at getting a 10 gigabit network switch. I only have 3 devices that could use that speed right now but I do plan on upgrading things over time.
Any recommendations?
The comments here saying to not bother with 10gbe is surprising considering it’s the selfhosted community, not a random home networking self help. Dismissing a reasonable request form someone who is building a homelab is not a good way to grow niche communities like this one on the fediverse.
10gbe has come down in price a lot recently but is still more expensive than 1gb of course.
Ideas for switches: https://www.servethehome.com/the-ultimate-cheap-10gbe-switch-buyers-guide-netgear-ubiquiti-qnap-mikrotik-qct/
https://www.servethehome.com/nicgiga-s25-0501-m-managed-switch-review-5-port-2-5gbe-and-sfp-realtek/
For a router: https://www.servethehome.com/everything-homelab-node-goes-1u-rackmount-qotom-intel-review/
Personally going 10G on my networking stuff has significantly improved my experience with self-hosting, especially when it comes to file transfers. 1G can just be extremely slow when you’re dealing with large amounts of data so I also don’t really understand why people recommend against 10G here of all places.
I think it has to do with data differences between self hosters and data hoarders.
Example: a self hosted with an RPI home assistant setup and a N100 server with some paperwork, photos, nextcloud, and a small jellyfin library.
A few terabytes of storage and their goal is to replace services they paid for in an efficient manner. Large data transfers will happen extremely rarely and it would be limited in size, likely for backing up some important documents or family photos. Maybe they have a few hundred Mbit internet max.
Vs
A data hoarder with 500TB of raid array storage that indexes all media possible, has every retail game sold for multiple consoles, has taken 10k RAW photos, has multiple daily and weekly backups to different VPS storages, hosts a public website, has >gigabit internet, and is seeding 500 torrents at a given time.
I would venture to guess that option 1 is the vast majority of cases in selfhosting, and 10Gb networking is much more expensive for limited benefit for them.
Now on a data hoarding community, option 2 would be a reasonable assumption and could benefit greatly from 10Gb.
Also 10Gb is great for companies, which are less likely to be posting on a self hosted community.
I somewhat disagree that you have to be a data hoarder for 10G to be worth it. For example I’ve got a headless steam client on my server that has my larger games installed (all in all ~2TB so not in data hoarder territories) which allows me to install and update those games at ~8 Gbit/s. Which in turn allows me to run a leaner Desktop PC since I can just uninstall the larger games as soon as I don’t play them daily anymore and saves me time when Steam inevitably fails to auto update a game on my Desktop before I want to play it.
Arguably a niche use case but it exists along side other such niche use cases. So if someone comes into this community and asks about how best to implement 10G networking I will assume they (at least think) have such a use case on their hands and want to improve that situation a bit.
I bought all the gear to do 10gbe but ultimately went back to 1gig simply because the power consumption. The switch alone used 20w at idle and each NIC burned 8w and I couldn’t justify it.
I’m partial to mikrotik gear, the CRS305 has 4 sfp+ ports for around $150.
Gonna disagree here. Microtik is a problematic company at best. They’re super lax on security, and they’ve had a lot of issues with their products in general. They also offer no real warranty, but I assume that’s because they aren’t a dedicated networking company (they make other things).
Just last year the flags were raised on dated firmware that left something like a million devices vulnerable, and their response was lacking.
On the plus side: they are part of the EU, so data protection laws apply, and they do seem to be in the forefront on uptake of modern equipment and standards.
Can you elaborate on how their response was lacking? From what I found the stable branch had a patch for that vulnerability available for several months before the first report while the lts branch had one available a week before the first article (arguably a brief period to wait before releasing news about the vulnerability but not unheard of either).
MikroTik also offers a 2 year warranty since they legally have to, no idea what you’re on about there. Also also not sure what you think they sell other than networking because for the life of me I can’t find anything other than networking related stuff on their website.
Yeah I’ve worked at WISPs that were pushing TBs through their core routers every day. Those core routers? Mikrotiks. Every apartment buildings core routers and fiber aggregation switches? Mikrotiks. You had to get down to the access layer switches that fed the individual apartments to hit Cisco equipment.
This person is just repeating some shit they read somewhere, hoping it makes them sound knowledgeable. In another post they’re recommending trendnet shit. Get back to me when you can set up BGP peering on your trendnet lol.
As far as warranty goes, Trendnet does Lifetime for their enterprise metal devices, which OP mentioned being interested in. Just looked at Microtik official warranty page, and it says to email support. Big difference.
Depending on your forecasted capacity needs, Ubiquity does have some attractive options depending on your comfort with managed vs unmanaged switches is. I am making some assumptions based on homelab tendencies. I have been very happy with the UniFi ecosystem personally, though I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The Dream Machine Pro has been very good for me both operationally and reliability wise, and there are expansion options for 10Gb Ethernet or SFP+ switches that cover most (pro/prosumer) price ranges.
They are definitely not the best bang for buck necessarily, and I have not tried any MikroTik alternatives to directly compare so take my opinions with a big grain of salt. I work in a purely Cisco environment and am used to working almost exclusively in CLI, but I found the UniFi GUI and environment easy enough to pick up with a little effort. UniFi firewall is too permissive by default if you are using something like the Dream Machine as the front end, but as a Boundary non-expert it was not too difficult to configure satisfactorily. Wireless APs are pretty great too.
That’s a big number. What’s the use case? Just cause?
I’m not op, but: I have 10gbit between by truenas server and my proxmox server. The use case is faster access to files from my proxmox server.
1gbit is actually quite slow when we talk disk speed.
I had exactly the same use case and I ended up with a 40G DAC fiber for that case. It ended up cheaper than converting the whole lan to 10G.
That said, it feels like used 10G equipment is easier to come by than 2.5G for now, and if you have 2G fiber uplink and only 1G past the router then it’s a waste.
Point of clarification: DAC is copper, AOC is fiber.
A lot of 10G equipment will support 5G/2.5G SFPs as well, so it can still be beneficial to go 10G on the core equipment.
Email does take some serious bandwidth
On a more serious note, people who have fast Internet should be running Tor relays. It would make the network much faster and secure.
Will you protect them from police raids and cover their legal costs for running a Tor node?
And it’s quite likely they only have 10G locally, with way less bandwidth going to the outside.
There’s different types of relay, including exit relays, which are the legally problematic type. Middle, guard, and bridge relays don’t face the same issues with law enforcement and IP blocking.
Don’t run a Tor node in places that have censorship laws or problems with freedom. In places such as the US and most of Europe it should be totally fine to run a node. What the network really needs is more middle nodes. You can inform your ISP and the local police of what you are doing just to be sure.
The only time you could get into trouble is when you are running a exit node. ISPs and police have mistakenly classified out nodes as local traffic. It is recommended that only organizations such as universities run Tor exit nodes. However, it is important to keep in mind that to my knowledge no one has ever been arrested for running a exit node in a western country.
Do the devices have dual 10g ports each? You can build a triangle out of them.
