Project - 37a (Wendyhouse)
- Thread starter Steveocee
- Start date
Soldato
I'm thinking of doing something similar in the future and I was wondering if you have to declare it seperatly on your insurance?
It has multiple security and entry alerting mechanisms. I've just not mentioned them in the thread
I haven't as strictly speaking it's a glorified shed with a PC in it.
Soldato
It's been a long time since I've touched anything in my cave or network so this summer I've decided the cave may finally get finished. Gutters and brackets etc are bought and just waiting to get hold of some fascia boards now.
In the mean time I've had an attic network tidy up and took it from this the image further up (or in spoiler if you want a quick look):
To this:
I'm much happier now, although it's in the attic it was seriously making me wince at the mess it was in.
How does the CRS328 perform? I was seriously looking at getting one before chickening out due to reading a lot of varying reviews on the smaller models and getting a juniper EX3300-24P for £50 more.
It's been absolutely fine for me. I've not even had any of the SFP in an SFP+ issues some people seem to have reported, auto neg has always worked fine. I don't really push the switching abilities that much (although it is my "core" switch for the house) but the absolute godsend for me (don't know if the Juniper does it) is the auto 24v or 48v output. I run a mixture of kit so being able to just stick it into any port and it learn itself is brilliant. The UniFi switches of course do it if you manually set them to 24v but this is just plug and go.
Thinking about picking up the cheap 4 SFP+ port MikroTik so I can run 10GB down to the mancave (or a CRS326 in place of the CRS125). I absolutely don't need it but 10GB.....
Update! Not so much cave related (that's coming soon) but have made a few changes to things.
I don't seem to have posted any images but I moved off the Ryzen platform onto an 8700K. I have images of the change just didn't appear to post them so I won't be boring you with "old" tech pics. Also moved onto an M2 drive and gotten rid of the all mechanical drives as well.
Bit of bling, had this for months but never got round to stripping the PC to install a £9 part. As I was cleaning/dusting/tinkering fitted the EK heat spreader
Moved the fan positions, as you look at this the middle fan was the other side of the heat spread an too close for my liking.
Before
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After
So to come!
New HDD for the storage server (the heat recently has more or less killed 2 of my 4 Seagate 2TB's so am going to swap for "a" WD Red as RAID isn't really needed).
Kryonaut paste due as I'm hoping to get the 8700K up to 4.8Ghz (no delid)
Dell G-Sync monitor on it's way for some eye candy upgrades
Fascia board being measured and delivered soon, I am determined to get this the guttering done and down into a water butt
New desktop on the cards, touch longer this time as I want to re-purpose the "old" screen onto the desk for a hot desk to use with laptop.
Lots of cabling to get right for the storage servers, wanting to set up at least dual links or each for balance-alb
10G upgrade (looking at you for inspiration @Kei ) ??
I don't seem to have posted any images but I moved off the Ryzen platform onto an 8700K. I have images of the change just didn't appear to post them so I won't be boring you with "old" tech pics. Also moved onto an M2 drive and gotten rid of the all mechanical drives as well.
Bit of bling, had this for months but never got round to stripping the PC to install a £9 part. As I was cleaning/dusting/tinkering fitted the EK heat spreader
Moved the fan positions, as you look at this the middle fan was the other side of the heat spread an too close for my liking.
Before
So to come!
New HDD for the storage server (the heat recently has more or less killed 2 of my 4 Seagate 2TB's so am going to swap for "a" WD Red as RAID isn't really needed).
Kryonaut paste due as I'm hoping to get the 8700K up to 4.8Ghz (no delid)
Dell G-Sync monitor on it's way for some eye candy upgrades
Fascia board being measured and delivered soon, I am determined to get this the guttering done and down into a water butt
New desktop on the cards, touch longer this time as I want to re-purpose the "old" screen onto the desk for a hot desk to use with laptop.
Lots of cabling to get right for the storage servers, wanting to set up at least dual links or each for balance-alb
10G upgrade (looking at you for inspiration @Kei ) ??
Last edited:
Soldato
The WD Red are good for multi-disk arrays (balanced so don't vibrate as much) and are pretty quiet. Not the fastest at 5400 spin though. Just replaced my first 3TB failure after 6 years. Other three going strong still, this one was showing media errors.
Interested in what you do 10G wise. Keep looking at it myself for the house to office run but not getting anywhere - can't run pre-terminated fibre down my duct as it's too small.
Interested in what you do 10G wise. Keep looking at it myself for the house to office run but not getting anywhere - can't run pre-terminated fibre down my duct as it's too small.
Soldato
Not sure if you picked up my reply in my server project thread so here it is.
I was seriously considering another intel x710 for the server too but it was 2.5x the cost of the solarflare/mellanox card. I tried the mellanox connectx-3 first but it was DOA and there were no others available at the time. Having got some info on solarflare from STH, I took a punt which paid off as it seems to perform very well. The x710's I bought cost £125 each and the intel SFP's were £36 each. I read a few reports that the FS branded transceivers coded to intel didn't work with x710 cards but worked ok in the older x520, so I didn't want to take a chance. The solarflare was £50 and the avago transceivers were free which is why I went that route. In hindsight, doing this again, I'd probably go solarflare for the whole lot as I could have gotten some current gen SFN8522 cards for £70 ish each which would have been a bargain had I known they were good at the time. I could also use DAC cables for the short <3m connections as the transceiver brand is unimportant with solarflare. If I ever want to expand from 4 SFP+ ports, I plan on buying a MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+IN and having twin uplinks with my juniper, though I doubt I'm going to need more than 4 ports for some time.
I've essentially finished getting the necessary hardware and done the testing which shows a few throughput issues that seem to be related to windows. Probably caused by my unwillingness to move from 1500byte MTU as I want a simplistic network config with no need create a separate 10Gb vlan and to fragment packets at the switch or router in order to access the outside. I've considered doing the separate vlan and retaining the 1Gbe copper connections on all the machines in order to maintain easy internet access for these machines with no packet fragmentation and inter vlan faff. The gear can do all that, however, my networking knowledge doesn't extend that far. I reckon that I'd probably get the full throughput with a 9000byte MTU, but 7Gbit/s is good enough for me as most transfers are going to be limited by other buses. I'm pretty sure that my LSI 1078 based raid controller card is limited to around 8-900MB/s anyway as it's an antique and really needs to be upgraded as it's limiting me to 2TB disks.
On the hard disk front, personally, I only use enterprise disks now. I've literally just bought a pair of WD ultrastar drives (4TB & 6TB) for two of the pcs and once I replace my raid controller, I'll probably move the server up to 8TB disks. I've been using WD Se drives for nearly 6 years now and they've survived being in the loft and in my pc.
Apologies, I did read it but I ended up on tangents (and researching solflare on eBay lol)
I was looking at the X520 cards in fairness. I'm still very reluctant to throw eggs into that basket not knowing compatibility with my hardware/software. In addition I'd likely want some DAC connectivity as well which I'm yet to find a reliable source say YES it will work from Intel > MikroTik and back.
I'd also be looking for a "simple" setup, no messing with MTU, VLAN or anything like that. I don't see why it should be harder than 1Gb networking. Saying that the bulk of my servers have dual port NICs so I'm tempted to throw balance-alb across them and cope with "just" 2Gb for now.
Soldato
You'll most likely find that with link aggregation, you'll only benefit if you're talking server to multiple workstations. Server to single workstation will only get 1Gbps. You may even be better to not aggregate them and let SMBv3 aggregate the links itself....if that is applicable. Other complexities with that as you end up with a multi-homed server.
Currently have an unraid box using 1of3 alb links, vHost using 1of4 links and then the filestore which I was planning on moving to either 10Gb or 2x1.
Currently Filestore will back itself up to Unraid box once per week, I use the vHost for individual VM's such as Plex which pulls data from Filestore so using alb into a switch would likely work well for my use.
the 3 fibre links from cave to attic could be bonded as well but it all becomes irrelevant if I go 10Gb as that would be 3 times more than the lot of them tied together as well.
I think 10Gb is the way to go. Just getting there sensibly is the problem.
Main PC should have enough slack to run the fibre straight up to it so could dump a 10Gb card into that, 1 for filestore (half height), 1 for unraid (half height) and 1 for vHost. Just picking through the kit and getting compatible SFP's is the problem.
Soldato
X520's are a little less picky about transceivers as there is a driver option that can allow 3rd party transceivers to be used. Buying intel coded parts from FS should work as if they were intel. AFAIK, mikrotik aren't too fussy on the transceiver brand based on what I read so an intel coded FS DAC cable should work. I chose to use fibre as the later intel X710's are renown for their frankly stupid insistence on using only intel transceivers. (which is nuts as they are made by finisar anyway) The main reason I opted for x710's is that they are so much newer than the x520 and are pcie 3.0 rather than 2.0. Based on my experience with solarflare, if I did this again, I'd just buy their cards as they seem to work well and have windows, linux and mac driver support and they aren't fussy about SFP brand.
In a lot of respects, most of the issues I've seen seem to point to windows being the cause. Probably as it needs to be professional workstation edition in order to get all the fancy offloading features on the cards to work. (Like RDMA)
In a lot of respects, most of the issues I've seen seem to point to windows being the cause. Probably as it needs to be professional workstation edition in order to get all the fancy offloading features on the cards to work. (Like RDMA)
STILL subbed 
Great project.
Loving the direction, especially the conversation re: 10Gbe. I've bought (and fitted) 2x 10gb cards with rj45 sockets on them.
trying to eek the last bit of performance out of my cat5e wired lan before I have to rip it all out to upgrade.
Next is the switch to be upgraded.... I know it wont give me 10gb speeds due to the cables, but >1gb is better that nothing, plus when we move house I'll wire in something higher spec.
If we dont move, then I've a load of plastering to do again 
Great project. Loving the direction, especially the conversation re: 10Gbe. I've bought (and fitted) 2x 10gb cards with rj45 sockets on them.
trying to eek the last bit of performance out of my cat5e wired lan before I have to rip it all out to upgrade.
Next is the switch to be upgraded.... I know it wont give me 10gb speeds due to the cables, but >1gb is better that nothing, plus when we move house I'll wire in something higher spec.
If we dont move, then I've a load of plastering to do again
Thank you
STILL subbed
Loving the direction, especially the conversation re: 10Gbe. I've bought (and fitted) 2x 10gb cards with rj45 sockets on them.
trying to eek the last bit of performance out of my cat5e wired lan before I have to rip it all out to upgrade.
Next is the switch to be upgraded.... I know it wont give me 10gb speeds due to the cables, but >1gb is better that nothing, plus when we move house I'll wire in something higher spec.
I've just checked on what a 10Gb ethernet switch would be in my preferred flavour and my eyebrows just about fell off! It;s going to have to be a staged rollout but the problem I have is I need both PoE and 10GB in the cave and the switch to do that is £400 which is a difficult one to stomach when at the moment I don't utilise the Gb I have more than 2% of the time (and then storage speeds will hold me off). Would like to do fibre to my desktop though...
Slight upgrade in the cave.
Gone from a U2515H with a P2217 above it:
To an S2716DG with the U2515H above it:
The P2217 will be sat next to thhe left as the "spare" or "hot desk" monitor for systems I build/repair/reinstall and I may build up a Linux rig to plug in as well.
Gone from a U2515H with a P2217 above it:
To an S2716DG with the U2515H above it:
The P2217 will be sat next to thhe left as the "spare" or "hot desk" monitor for systems I build/repair/reinstall and I may build up a Linux rig to plug in as well.
Soldato
Could you do it with two switches? 10Gbps backbone with gig PoE switch hanging off it? You can pick up something like a Netgear GS305P for £40 - maybe less with some shopping around.
If I reused the current 3 cat5's to the cave for PoE from my "main" switch I could likely install a CRS309 which could then take a 10G feed in from the core attic switch and then have 7 SFP+ ports available. I think rough count I have a need for 4 10G devices so that may work..... some food for thought certainly.
Soldato
Netgear do a range of switches that are powered off PoE and also power PoE devices. The GS516TP for example. They are managed but the interface is a bit clunky. I'm running a PoE switch off a UPS in the house and then a pair of trunked gig links to the GS516TP in the office (outbuilding). That's run off PoE and hence the UPS and then my phones and wifi run off the PoE from the GS516TP. Might not be of any help but it's an interesting scenario where it's both powered by and powering PoE.
Stage 1 of 10Gb FTTmc has started!
Managed to get what I think is a really decent deal on a bulk of solarflare 10Gb kit. Should be arriving this week.
Will be installing cards into the dell server (router), filestore n54, unraid n54, esxi box and my gaming PC. Thankfully the current CRS112 has some sfp connectivity although not + it will give enough time to get everything else sorted and a switch ordered (CRS309).
Updates this week!
Managed to get what I think is a really decent deal on a bulk of solarflare 10Gb kit. Should be arriving this week.
Will be installing cards into the dell server (router), filestore n54, unraid n54, esxi box and my gaming PC. Thankfully the current CRS112 has some sfp connectivity although not + it will give enough time to get everything else sorted and a switch ordered (CRS309).
Updates this week!