Question Upgrading/configuring my home network ?

[anvoice]

Very new to networking and trying to modify my home network to work with several NAS units as well as a software firewall to replace my current router. I currently have a Netgear modem connected to a TP-Link Archer ax50 (wifi 6) router, which connects to my QNAP NAS through two gigabit ports (link aggregation) as well as the NVR for my security cameras. Most of my PCs and mobile devices are wireless (with wifi 6 on most).

I am planning on building another NAS out of an old computer with TrueNAS, and that has a 2.5Gbe port. It could also be easily expanded with a 10Gbe PCIe card if necessary. The NAS will have 6 total HDDs and possibly NVMEs for caching (once I figure out whether that will actually introduce a performance benefit), and the HDDs I'm planning to use have a max sustained transfer rate of around 260MBps (more with RAID), easily enough to saturate a gigabit network port.

My new router will have 4 i226-V 2.5Gbe ports. I will repurpose my wireless router as a wireless access point, but clearly, I need a switch to support all of the connections (two gigabit connections from QNAP, one for wireless AP, one for TrueNAS unit) hopefully with some room for upgradability. It is my understanding that if I buy a gigabit switch and connect the 2.5Gbe (or more if upgraded) TrueNAS unit to that, the gigabit switch will likely become the bottleneck for that connection. On the other hand, multi-gigabit port switches, especially managed ones, are expensive for a home network.

The TP-link router I have now is theoretically capable of wireless speeds in excess of 1Gbps, so assuming all network traffic needs to go through the router (is that the case? Or will the wireless AP somehow deal with purely wireless traffic by itself?) with the TP-link serving as a simple AP, a gigabit switch in between the AP router may create a bottleneck.

(Too many) questions: Is it viable to connect the TrueNAS unit directly to one of the 2.5Gbpe ports on the router, and a gigabit switch for the slower devices to another router port? One tutorial video with a Pfsense router suggested connecting the wireless AP directly to the gigabit switch (connected to the modem), but will that bottleneck the wireless traffic? Should I connect the AP directly to the last router port? Finally, that same video instructs to connect the router-turned-AP via its LAN port, which is a gigabit port. Will I then still have a bottleneck for wireless traffic (again, assuming wireless traffic needs to go through the router)?

Thanks for reading. A lot I don't know yet, so my apologies if any of my questions are obvious. Planning to learn.

 

[bill001g]

First forget about wifi and gigabit speeds. You might get close to 1gbit if you use wifi6e stuff but even that only gets maybe 800-900 for people in the same room.
What device do you have that realisticly needs that much speed. Its not like you phone has 10tb of storage on it so does it really matter if you completely fill the data storage in 10 seconds rather than 20 seconds.

Just get a quality router/ap for wifi and hook it to your network via 1gbit and call it good enough.

I am not sure what device you are talking about that has 4 i226-v ports but that part number stands out. There is a massive hardware flaw in that chipset that was recently in the news. It can not be fixed with software and the work around seems to be to run it at 1gbit.
Intel has egg on their face again after doing something very similar with the 225 on launch.

So most switches will not bottleneck any traffic. If you have a switch with say 10 2.5g ports almost all have a backplane speed of 50gbit. Which means all ports can send 2.5g and receive 2.5g at the same time. It is almost impossible to come up with actual case that can use this much bandwidth. Now on really high end stuff say with lots of 10gbit ports you have to check the total backplane speeds. The switch itself is not the bottleneck.

What I would do is buy a router purely to talk to the internet. Its only purpose is do share the 1 IP address you get from your ISP. I would then connect everything to a single unmanged switch, although most switches with high end ports tend to be managed. I would also connect you AP to the switch.
So everything is connected together by this high speed backplane of the switch.

I have not kept up on this but there have been fairly inexpensive multiport 2.5g switches sold. I used to recommend microtik but it seems even tplink has 2.5g switches.


Note be very careful stuff like link aggregation does not actually increase the data rates for single data transfers.

 

[Ralston18]

"Planning to learn "

A good starting point is to make a diagram of your network. The diagram does not need to be be fancy or overly complex.

Strive to keep the diagram neat and clear. However, quite likely that the diagram will need some changes and corrections. Start with a template, make a copies, and edit the copies as you go.

Just show all of the devices, the wired port to port (show port numbers) connections (or indicate wireless) along with make, model, network name, IP address (DHCP or static), subnet mask, and MAC. On the diagram make other notes as necessary. Allowed number of devices, established DCHP IP address ranges. Assigned/reserved Static IP addresses. Use certain address ranges as a means to identify devices. One range fore wired DHCP devices, another range for DHCP wireless devices. Static IP range for NAS boxes, Printers, scanners, AP's etch.

There are many online diagrams that you can use as an example. Look and use a format that you like.

Include incoming connections and devices from your ISP.

Plus you make be able to take advantage of some free tools that can scan the network, discover and map devices. Often the tools are limited but can serve as a starting point Some routers even provide a diagram and/or a list of devices that are or have been connected.

Being able to view the proverbial "big picture" will go a long ways towards keeping track of everything.

And later troublehsooting....

 

[anvoice]

First forget about wifi and gigabit speeds. You might get close to 1gbit if you use wifi6e stuff but even that only gets maybe 800-900 for people in the same room.
What device do you have that realisticly needs that much speed. Its not like you phone has 10tb of storage on it so does it really matter if you completely fill the data storage in 10 seconds rather than 20 seconds.

I plan to explore various methods of doing backups (both PCs and Android phones) so I thought I might be able to take advantage of higher wifi throughput to talk to the 2.5Gbe NAS. Assuming each single device can do around 800Mbps, two devices trying to do a backup to the NAS may saturate the gigabit port on the access point. Is that not the case?

I am not sure what device you are talking about that has 4 i226-v ports but that part number stands out. There is a massive hardware flaw in that chipset that was recently in the news. It can not be fixed with software and the work around seems to be to run it at 1gbit.

It's a dedicated fanless ESXi/OPNSense/Pfsense box with a N6005 processor from Aliexpress. Ok, that is clearly a failure on my part: I did read about the i225 problem but did not know that the i226-V has a hardware flaw too. I think I still have time to cancel the order, but should I? I think said box or variations on it only come with i225 or i226 NICs, from what I saw, so I'd be stuck building a power-hungry PC for the purpose or getting a similar box elsewhere.

What I would do is buy a router purely to talk to the internet. Its only purpose is do share the 1 IP address you get from your ISP. I would then connect everything to a single unmanged switch, although most switches with high end ports tend to be managed. I would also connect you AP to the switch.
So everything is connected together by this high speed backplane of the switch.

Right, that's what the abovementioned box is for. I was planning to run either OPNSense or openWRT on it. So it's the switch that will be doing LAN routing, not the router box? I assumed that traffic may have to go through the actual router (I'm completely new to this) after hitting the switch. That is, wifi device wants to do a backup to the wired NAS, sends data to router switch, that talks to router, then that goes back through the switch to the NAS, thus being limited by a 1Gbps connection if there is one. Is that not the case? Also, is there a particular reason to get an unmanaged switch vs managed?

Note be very careful stuff like link aggregation does not actually increase the data rates for single data transfers.

Would "single data transfers" include the entirety of a backup? Or will the backup intelligently spread the data into packets to send via multiple gigabit connections to the router?

A good starting point is to make a diagram of your network. The diagram does not need to be be fancy or overly complex.

Great suggestion, I'll start exercising my limited digital artistic skills to make one now!

Another important question arose: can/should I add a M.2 2230 ax210 adapter to the router box, with a couple internal/external antennas, and do wireless that way? I know I'd definitely want openWRT for this, but worth it? Seems like then I won't be limited by wired gigabit ports connecting to the access point, but I'm worried wifi quality will suffer since the TP-link ax50 may be better in terms of wifi hardware.

 

[bill001g]

The wifi bandwidth is shared. If you were to run 2 devices at the same time they would compete for the bandwidth. In many cases the combined bandwidth would be less than running the device individually. Wifi is half duplex which greatly decreases the performance.

They fixed the 225 ones...or at least anything manufactured more recently. The 226 is a brand new issue that was just reported maybe a month ago max. It is going to be quite a while before they can find and fix the problem and then actually make the chips. That is before they even ship them to the companies that assemble them onto various devices.

Traffic would only pass through a router when it is on a different network...ie subnet. From a network perspective you can think of a wifi network as a bunch of devices hooked to a switch that just connects via radio rather than ethernet.

So the traffic would go from the wifi box to the switch and then directly to the port on the switch that has the nas. Even though it might look like traffic is using IP addresses it really is using mac addresses to talk between devices on a lan/switch.

Port aggregations, ie 802.3ad, is really stupid. It uses a mathematical method to select the path. In a simple example it would add the source and destianation IP together and if the number was even it would put the traffic on the first path if it was odd it would put the traffic on the second path.
If a second session came in it would do the same and it can easily put all the traffic on a single link and leave the other idle. Its path selection has no concept of utilization.
It was never designed for this use. It was meant when you have a server with a huge number of machines accessing it. The pure randomness of IP addresses and port number will allow load balancing but it is still random.
It has not been used on commercial servers since 10g port became available many years ago. It is a feature that should be remove from consumer and even most business switches. It is used in some redundant switch configuration because it fails over slightly faster than something like spanning tree.
Only something you see in huge data centers where they can design for a physical switch failure.

I would not bother trying to build your own wifi box. Just buy a router and use it as a AP. If you actually think you are going to be limited by the wifi just buy routers/ap with multiple 5g radios or multiple AP with multiple radios. Again how much data do you think you are going to be running on a continuous basis to wifi.
Its not like you are going to do something stupid and run render farms and connect them via wifi when you can just use 2.5 or 10g internet connections.

 

[USAFRet]

I plan to explore various methods of doing backups (both PCs and Android phones) so I thought I might be able to take advantage of higher wifi throughput to talk to the 2.5Gbe NAS.

A good backup routine, and you really don't care about uber speed.
It happens while you are sleeping, or otherwise not using the system.

In addition, Incremental backups are generally very small, and don't take a lot of time.
From my C drive, last nights Incremental of 4.6GB took about 1 minute. But this happened while I slept, so it wouldn't matter if it took longer.

 

[USAFRet]

I plan to explore various methods of doing backups

Modified somewhat since I wrote this, but the basics:

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[anvoice]

Sounds very reasonable.

I am trying to learn both networking and backups right now, so probably will be doing a lot of backups of Linux, Windows, and Android devices. I understand that incremental backups and backing up while you're sleeping are great, but as I start out, I will probably be doing a lot of backups during the day, and limiting the speed too much can limit my learning speed. Since most of the devices I have are wireless with wifi 6 or 6e, I assumed simultaneous backups especially could max out a gigabit speed: my current router should be capable of total throughput in excess of a gigabit per second. If that is the case I might be served well by a 2.5Gbe switch. I do understand I might be overengineering things in an expensive way, so if this reasoning is bad please let me know. Btw, is a managed or unmanaged switch better here?

I would not bother trying to build your own wifi box. Just buy a router and use it as a AP. If you actually think you are going to be limited by the wifi just buy routers/ap with multiple 5g radios or multiple AP with multiple radios. Again how much data do you think you are going to be running on a continuous basis to wifi.

I do have the ax50 which I can use (by the way a wifi analyzer occasionally shows speeds in excess of a gigabit in a room adjacent to the router). But if I am limited by a gig port (again, possibly a lot of wireless backups during the day), the router/AP would then need a multi-gig uplink port, correct? In this case, might it be better to simply add the ax210 card to the router with openWRT and avoid that altogether? Very cheap method, but I don't know if it'll work as well as my current wireless router (cheaper because I have it but limited by the gigabit uplink port).

They fixed the 225 ones...or at least anything manufactured more recently. The 226 is a brand new issue that was just reported maybe a month ago max. It is going to be quite a while before they can find and fix the problem and then actually make the chips. That is before they even ship them to the companies that assemble them onto various devices.

So I won't get the 2.5Gbe speeds basically? Contemplating canceling the order then, but then what should I get for openWRT/OPNsense?

Modified somewhat since I wrote this, but the basics:

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

Thanks for the link!