[TriLUG] Above Gigabit Network

[John via TriLUG]

I've just started venturing into this for the home lab recently since 
prices have been getting more than reasonable especially with some 2nd 
hand hardware.

I first got a Zyxel XGS1250-12 as I had hoped the stated support by 
OpenWRT was in a better spot than it turned out to be. It unfortunately 
was not; though, as of about a week ago there seems to be a PR that 
looks promising. I ended up going back to stock firmware, but its been 
reasonably solid to give me a few 10g links between a couple hypervisors 
for fast backups and migrations so now the disks are the bottleneck.

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/configure-mixed-vlans-on-a-zyxel-xgs1250-12-managed-switch/173418

I've also started building out a baby proxmox cluster with a Mikrotik 
CRS309-1G-8S+IN as the main switch and some refurb Mellanox CX3 NICs in 
the 1L PCs so I can play around with ceph and a distributed compute 
project. Both those HW bits as well as the Zyxel seem to be pretty happy 
to work with some cheap 10gtek DACs and as far as my testing has shown 
are pushing close enough to line rate to justify use in a home network 
if you can keep runs short. I'd wager their fiber transceivers will work 
just fine as well; though, you need to limit the rj45 adapter 
transcievers you put into a passively cooled switch unless you want to 
exceed the duty cycle and burn out your HW early.

Side note the Intel X540-T2 can be had reasonably cheap 2nd hand on ebay 
and as far as I can tell JUST WERKS™ in bookworm even if it runs a bit 
hot. Also on the off chance you have an r720 or 3 in the mix the 10g 
capable mezzanine NICs can be had for dirt cheap and if you tune an 
opnsense VM right with a high clock CPU you can get it routing packets 
between vlans at somewhere between 2.5 -3.2 gbps or maybe more if you 
don't use any plugins and have a simple firewall rule set.

On 11/28/23 10:07, Brian via TriLUG wrote:
>>>     Should I look at an switch that has SFP input? 
> Just recently upgraded a segment of my network to 10gbps.  I don't 
> think you /need/ SFP ports unless you want to mix fiber and copper.  
> The 10g switch I bought has a couple SFP ports, probably intended for 
> higher-bandwidth backhaul-type connections; all the regular station 
> ports are your typical RJ-45 type.
>
> >> Is it as easy as
> >>     plugging RJ-45 into a SFP adapter which plugs into the switch?
>
> Yes, but that adapter is a bit pricey.
>
> You will need* Cat-6 cabling for the >1gbps links.
>
> I'd really recommend taking your LAN all the way to 10g if you can 
> afford it.  That way you have room to grow as broadband gets faster, 
> as well as having the potential for NAS access times that rival 
> internal disk times.
>
> [Sadly my NAS is underpowered at several levels...an ARM host doing 
> software RAID to a USB-C-connected QNAP enclosure...something to 
> upgrade down the road!]
>
> My non-expert $0.02,
> -B