Need to change up or set up my home Wi-Fi?
Need to change up or set up my home Wi-Fi?
I am really new to networking and trying to change my home network setup to use several NAS units plus a software firewall instead of just my old router. Right now, I have a Netgear modem connected to an Archer AX50 (wifi 6) router that connects to my QNAP NAS using two gigabit ports for link aggregation, as well as the switch for my security cameras. Most of my computers and phones use wifi with speed over 1Gbps on them.
I am planning to build another NAS out of an old computer running TrueNAS, which also has a 2.5GbE port. This new NAS could be easily expanded if needed by adding more storage cards like a 10GbE card. The NAS will have six hard drive bays and maybe some NVMe drives for faster memory once I figure out how they work better together. The hard drives I plan to use can handle about 260MB per second, which is enough to fill up the network lines even if they are in a RAID setup. My new router will have four ports that support 2.5Gbps speeds using Intel i226-V chips.
I think it is okay to put my wireless router as an access point, but I definitely need a switch so everyone can connect at once with two lines from the QNAP NAS, one line for the wireless AP, and another line for the TrueNAS unit. I hope there is room left over for future upgrades too.
I thought if I buy a gigabit switch and plug the 2.5Gbps TrueNAS unit into it, that switch would become the slow bottleneck because it can't handle the speed of the new unit. On the other hand, multi-gigabit switches are really expensive for a home network setup. My current TP-Link router is actually capable of wireless speeds over 1Gbps, so I am wondering if all my traffic needs to go through this router first (is that true?). Or will the wireless access point handle its own wifi stuff on its own?
Here are some questions: Can I connect the TrueNAS unit directly to one of the 2.5GbE ports on the modem and use a gigabit switch for other slower devices to another 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 slow down my wifi traffic? Should I connect the AP directly to the last router port instead? Finally, that same video says to connect the router-turned-AP via its LAN port, which is a gigabit port. Will I still have a bottleneck for wifi traffic if all wireless stuff goes through this router?
Thanks for reading! I am really learning and don't know everything yet, so sorry if any of my questions sound silly or obvious. I hope you help me out too since it would be great to learn more about networking.
Forget about wifi and gigabit speeds for now. You might get close to 1gbit if you use wifi6e stuff, but even that only gets maybe 800-900 Mbps for people in the same room. What device do you have that realistically needs that much speed? It is not like your 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 and connect 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 to 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.
Planning to learn? A good start is making a simple chart of your network. You don't need fancy stuff, just keep it tidy and easy to read. Probably you'll have to change things along the way. Start with a template, make copies, and edit them as you go. Just show all devices, how wired ports connect (or show wireless), along with make, model, network name, IP address (DHCP or static), subnet mask, MAC address. Add notes where needed on the chart. You can use certain rules to tell apart devices. Give one range for wired DHCP devices, another for wireless DHCP devices. Set a separate range for Static IPs like NAS boxes, printers, scanners, APs, etc. There are lots of online charts you can look at as examples. Pick a format that suits you and go ahead. Include any connections from your ISP. Plus find free tools to scan the network, discover things, and map devices. Often these tools aren't perfect but they can help. Some routers even show diagrams or list connected devices. Seeing the "big picture" helps keep track of everything and fix problems later on.
I plan trying different ways to save my data so I might find a way to use fast Wi-Fi to talk to my 2.5Gbe NAS. If one device can handle about 800Mbps, having two devices try to save at the same time could make the gigabit port on the router full. Is that right? It's a dedicated fanless box running ESXi or OPNSense with an N6005 processor from Aliexpress. That means I made a mistake because I thought only the i225 had problems, but the i226-V also has one. I guess I still have time to cancel this order, but should I? From what I saw online, these boxes usually only come with either an i225 or an i226 NIC, so it sounds like I'll be stuck building a slow PC just for the backup job or buying another box elsewhere. Right, that is exactly why those boxes are built this way. I was planning to use OPNSense or openWRT on this thing. So the switch will handle the local network routing, not the router? I assumed my data might have to go through the real router after hitting the switch. That means when my Wi-Fi device wants to save to the NAS over the wire, it sends data to the switch, which talks to the router, then comes back through the switch to the NAS, and if there is a 1Gbps connection, that slows things down. Is that right too? Also, should I buy an unmanaged switch instead of a managed one? Does "sending one piece of data" mean the whole backup happens in one go, or will the system spread the work out so multiple connections help speed it up? Great tip, I'll start making something with my limited digital creativity now! Another big question came up: should I add an M.2 2230 ax210 adapter to the router box with a few internal/external antennas and do wireless that way? I know I'd definitely want openWRT for this, but is it worth it? Seems like then I won't be limited by slow wired connections to my access point, but I'm worried my Wi-Fi signal quality will suffer since the TP-link ax50 might actually be better in terms of hardware.
The Wi-Fi connection is shared, so if two devices try to use it at the same time they fight for that space. Often, both devices get less speed than if one device used it alone. Wi-Fi works like a half duplex thing which slows things down. Some 225 units had the problem but newer stuff makes fewer chips with this bug. The 226 is new and might be fixed soon, but it will take a long time before the chips are ready to ship to factories.
Traffic only goes through a router if devices are on different networks or subnets. Think of the Wi-Fi setup like many little computers plugged into a switch that connects just by radio waves instead of cables. So data moves from the Wi-Fi box to the switch and then straight to the port where your NAS is sitting. Even though it looks like IP addresses, it's really using MAC addresses to talk between devices on the local network. Port aggregation (802.3ad) is a bad idea. It uses math to guess which path to take. For example, if you add two numbers together and they are even, traffic goes one way; if odd, another. When more data comes in, it does this again and can easily make all traffic use just one link while the other sits idle. This feature has no idea about how busy the line is. It was never meant for regular computers with many devices accessing them at once. Pure randomness of numbers makes load balancing work but it's still random. Companies stopped using it on big servers years ago because 10 Gigabit ports came out and made it obsolete. It should be gone from consumer and most business switches. Only big data centers use this feature because they can build physical redundancy to handle a switch failure better than anything else. I would not bother trying to make your own Wi-Fi box. Just buy a router that acts as an Access Point and use it directly. If you really think the Wi-Fi will slow you down, just buy routers or APs with 5G radios, or even multiple radios on one device. How much data do you plan to send over Wi-Fi? You don't need to run huge farms like render farms through a Wi-Fi connection when you can use 2.5 Gigabit or 10 Gigabit internet lines instead.
You don't really need super fast backups because they can happen when you are sleeping or not using the computer at all. These small backups usually take up very little space and aren't that slow. From my C drive, a big Incremental backup from last night was just 4.6GB and took about one minute. But since I was asleep during that process, it wouldn't have mattered if it had taken longer anyway.
I wrote this already. So here is the main thing: What do you have for backup at home? What about your backups? And if you aren't doing that, why not? Every day I see lots of posts on these forums asking how to get things back or telling stories about lost photos from a dead drive or a phone that fell in water. It's all about finding the data after something goes wrong like it was accidentally deleted or your hard drive broke.
It sounds pretty good to me. I am learning about networking and backups right now, so I will probably back up lots of Linux, Windows, and Android devices. I know that making incremental backups while you sleep is a great idea, but when I start out, I might have to do many backups during the day. If I limit the speed too much, it could slow down my learning process. Since most of my devices use wireless with wifi 6 or 6e, I thought simultaneous backups would work well because my router can probably handle over a gigabit per second in total throughput. Even if that is true, using a 2.5Gbe switch might help. I know I might be overengineering things and spending too much money on this, so please tell me if I should change my mind.
By the way, how do you like managed or unmanaged switches? I have an ax50 which I can use (also by the way a wifi analyzer sometimes shows speeds in excess of a gigabit near the router). But if I am limited by a gig port (maybe because of many wireless backups during the day), then my router/AP would need a multi-gig uplink port, right? If that is true, might it be better to just add an ax210 card to the router with openWRT and avoid buying this switch altogether? This method is very cheap, but I don't know if it will work as well as my current wireless router (which is cheaper because I already have one but limited by a gigabit uplink port). So I won't get 2.5Gbe speeds basically? Thinking about canceling the order then, so what should I buy instead of openWRT/OPNsense? Thanks for the link!