I’ve gotten into selfhosting and have 3 mini PC’s

ODROID H4+ for TrueNAS
One for Home Assistant
and another for Immich and Nextcloud

They’re all just plugged into the router my ISP provided with network cables.

I’d like to get a managed switch or a router of my own that can function as a switch and router

I’ll be putting everything in a 10" rack at some point so it has to fit.

Any suggestions or tips would be appreciated, I’ve done some research and looked at options but unsure what is right/wrong

I’m especially stuck on what Hardware to get. Is 2.5ghz managed switch overkill? Should I get PoE for future use?
What brands are good, what should be avoided?

  • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
    41·
    4 days ago

    I’m not sure what you’re asking

    In your position, I would want a VPN. I like wire guard, it’s pretty simple compared to other options… But just comparatively

    If you want to do networking to network, I can suggest all sorts of things… None of them is practical for normal use cases, but some are pretty neat

    • Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Right now I’m struggling to figure out what hardware to buy The Zyxel XGS1210-12 seems perfect but it won’t fit in a 10" rack

      • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        You could mount it on top or vertically behind the rack and have it still look decent and be functional with a little handiwork

        You still are going to need a router, although you don’t need a fancy router and a fancy switch, you just have to make sure you’re not bottlenecked and have to design things differently

        2.5 gb is probably more than enough, but you could probably get away with 1 gb if you aren’t doing a lot of file transfers - if it’s just backups and streaming video, if you want to get fancy it might become a bottleneck.

        PoE is kinda niche so unless you have specific plans to use it, it probably won’t come up

        The switch supports vlans, so you could get fancy with a VPN gateway and access these things remotely with a Virtual DMZ, but realistically that’s a bitch to set up and you could just make a real DMZ with a router/wifi access point combo. Or just forget the DMZ and have a VPN gateway that connects to the local network

        I really just don’t know enough about how you want to use this to get more specific. This is probably more switch than you need, but if you’re not connecting from outside it’ll probably work great for the LAN

        Networking is all about bottlenecks, and I doubt this will be a bottleneck for a good while