I’m looking at getting a 10 gigabit network switch. I only have 3 devices that could use that speed right now but I do plan on upgrading things over time.
Any recommendations?
I’m partial to mikrotik gear, the CRS305 has 4 sfp+ ports for around $150.
Gonna disagree here. Microtik is a problematic company at best. They’re super lax on security, and they’ve had a lot of issues with their products in general. They also offer no real warranty, but I assume that’s because they aren’t a dedicated networking company (they make other things).
Just last year the flags were raised on dated firmware that left something like a million devices vulnerable, and their response was lacking.
On the plus side: they are part of the EU, so data protection laws apply, and they do seem to be in the forefront on uptake of modern equipment and standards.
You are a foolish person.
As far as warranty goes, Trendnet does Lifetime for their enterprise metal devices, which OP mentioned being interested in. Just looked at Microtik official warranty page, and it says to email support. Big difference.
https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/exploit/linux/misc/cisco_ios_xe_rce/
We can go back and forth on RCEs literally all day. If your bar for using a product is “no RCEs”, get off the grid entirely my guy.
MikroTik is just as serious a network company as Cisco or Juniper, and vastly more serious from an enterprise networking point of view than trendnet.
Also where tf did OP mention anything about warranties?
Edit - https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/trendnet-ac2600-rce-via-wan-8926b29908a4
Edit - https://www.archcloudlabs.com/projects/trendnet-731br/
Edit - lol holy shit look how customer focused trendnet is! They just plugged their ears and pretended an unauthenticated RCE in their product didn’t exist haha. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/no-patch-for-remote-code-execution-bug-in-d-link-and-trendnet-routers/
Edit - oof yikes look there’s more. https://www.nccgroup.com/us/research-blog/technical-advisory-multiple-vulnerabilities-in-trendnet-tew-831dr-wifi-router-cve-2022-30325-cve-2022-30326-cve-2022-30327-cve-2022-30328-cve-2022-30329/
Yeah, I trust Mikrotik much more than Trendnet, though I’m happy to use Trendnet for internal switches.
Depending on your forecasted capacity needs, Ubiquity does have some attractive options depending on your comfort with managed vs unmanaged switches is. I am making some assumptions based on homelab tendencies. I have been very happy with the UniFi ecosystem personally, though I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The Dream Machine Pro has been very good for me both operationally and reliability wise, and there are expansion options for 10Gb Ethernet or SFP+ switches that cover most (pro/prosumer) price ranges.
They are definitely not the best bang for buck necessarily, and I have not tried any MikroTik alternatives to directly compare so take my opinions with a big grain of salt. I work in a purely Cisco environment and am used to working almost exclusively in CLI, but I found the UniFi GUI and environment easy enough to pick up with a little effort. UniFi firewall is too permissive by default if you are using something like the Dream Machine as the front end, but as a Boundary non-expert it was not too difficult to configure satisfactorily. Wireless APs are pretty great too.
The comments here saying to not bother with 10gbe is surprising considering it’s the selfhosted community, not a random home networking self help. Dismissing a reasonable request form someone who is building a homelab is not a good way to grow niche communities like this one on the fediverse.
10gbe has come down in price a lot recently but is still more expensive than 1gb of course.
Ideas for switches: https://www.servethehome.com/the-ultimate-cheap-10gbe-switch-buyers-guide-netgear-ubiquiti-qnap-mikrotik-qct/
https://www.servethehome.com/nicgiga-s25-0501-m-managed-switch-review-5-port-2-5gbe-and-sfp-realtek/
For a router: https://www.servethehome.com/everything-homelab-node-goes-1u-rackmount-qotom-intel-review/
I bought all the gear to do 10gbe but ultimately went back to 1gig simply because the power consumption. The switch alone used 20w at idle and each NIC burned 8w and I couldn’t justify it.
Very reasonable. FWIW, sfp uses way less power than rj45 for 10gbe if that’s an option.
This is what I was looking for! Thank you!
Personally going 10G on my networking stuff has significantly improved my experience with self-hosting, especially when it comes to file transfers. 1G can just be extremely slow when you’re dealing with large amounts of data so I also don’t really understand why people recommend against 10G here of all places.
I think it has to do with data differences between self hosters and data hoarders.
Example: a self hosted with an RPI home assistant setup and a N100 server with some paperwork, photos, nextcloud, and a small jellyfin library.
A few terabytes of storage and their goal is to replace services they paid for in an efficient manner. Large data transfers will happen extremely rarely and it would be limited in size, likely for backing up some important documents or family photos. Maybe they have a few hundred Mbit internet max.
Vs
A data hoarder with 500TB of raid array storage that indexes all media possible, has every retail game sold for multiple consoles, has taken 10k RAW photos, has multiple daily and weekly backups to different VPS storages, hosts a public website, has >gigabit internet, and is seeding 500 torrents at a given time.
I would venture to guess that option 1 is the vast majority of cases in selfhosting, and 10Gb networking is much more expensive for limited benefit for them.
Now on a data hoarding community, option 2 would be a reasonable assumption and could benefit greatly from 10Gb.
Also 10Gb is great for companies, which are less likely to be posting on a self hosted community.
I somewhat disagree that you have to be a data hoarder for 10G to be worth it. For example I’ve got a headless steam client on my server that has my larger games installed (all in all ~2TB so not in data hoarder territories) which allows me to install and update those games at ~8 Gbit/s. Which in turn allows me to run a leaner Desktop PC since I can just uninstall the larger games as soon as I don’t play them daily anymore and saves me time when Steam inevitably fails to auto update a game on my Desktop before I want to play it.
Arguably a niche use case but it exists along side other such niche use cases. So if someone comes into this community and asks about how best to implement 10G networking I will assume they (at least think) have such a use case on their hands and want to improve that situation a bit.
And X-windows. There’s a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.
That’s a big number. What’s the use case? Just cause?
I’m not op, but: I have 10gbit between by truenas server and my proxmox server. The use case is faster access to files from my proxmox server.
1gbit is actually quite slow when we talk disk speed.
I had exactly the same use case and I ended up with a 40G DAC fiber for that case. It ended up cheaper than converting the whole lan to 10G.
That said, it feels like used 10G equipment is easier to come by than 2.5G for now, and if you have 2G fiber uplink and only 1G past the router then it’s a waste.
Point of clarification: DAC is copper, AOC is fiber.
A lot of 10G equipment will support 5G/2.5G SFPs as well, so it can still be beneficial to go 10G on the core equipment.
TIL, thanks!
