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?
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/
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.
This is what I was looking for! Thank you!
That’s a big number. What’s the use case? Just cause?
Email does take some serious bandwidth
On a more serious note, people who have fast Internet should be running Tor relays. It would make the network much faster and secure.
Will you protect them from police raids and cover their legal costs for running a Tor node?
And it’s quite likely they only have 10G locally, with way less bandwidth going to the outside.
There’s different types of relay, including exit relays, which are the legally problematic type. Middle, guard, and bridge relays don’t face the same issues with law enforcement and IP blocking.
You do face issues running a regular middle/guard relay. My IP is tainted from overzealous sysadmins looking up Tor related IPs and seeing mine because middle relays are public knowledge. I am banned from a lot of places for simply being a middle relay.
Thanks for the correction. It’s a shame that sysadmins balcklist middle nodes too, since they won’t see any TOR traffic originating from your IP address anyway.
Really? That’s so odd, I thought as long as you’re not running an exit node, you should be fine. TIL, I’ll have to check my ISP’s policies before setting one up then.
Your ISP doesn’t give a fuck, it’s not legal trouble. It’s just overzealous sysadmins blocking anything that seems sus. I am permanently banned from most SoMe, for example, for having abnormal network activity but none of it is illegal.
Exit relays are totally fine from a legal perspective. They key is making sure the ISP and local police are aware so they don’t come after you. ISPs have sent DMCA letters and such to operators when in reality they can’t and shouldn’t control the traffic coming out of Tor. The good news is that Tor has templates to respond.
Best practice is to let bigger organizations run exit relays so that there is the oversight from leadership.
Don’t run a Tor node in places that have censorship laws or problems with freedom. In places such as the US and most of Europe it should be totally fine to run a node. What the network really needs is more middle nodes. You can inform your ISP and the local police of what you are doing just to be sure.
The only time you could get into trouble is when you are running a exit node. ISPs and police have mistakenly classified out nodes as local traffic. It is recommended that only organizations such as universities run Tor exit nodes. However, it is important to keep in mind that to my knowledge no one has ever been arrested for running a exit node in a western country.
However, it is important to keep in mind that to my knowledge no one has ever been arrested for running a exit node in a western country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505009
There links to other occurrences of arrest in the comments.
That’s just for a exit node. I explicitly stated that one should only let larger organizations run a node.
Also, my original comment still stands about no one being arrested
What do you mean by not being arrested? I would say German police putting a black bag on your head and taking you to their station in the middle of the night is something one could consider an arrest.
Obligatory https://files.catbox.moe/6bwk52.gif
Honestly there isn’t a lot of reason for 10G. Honestly 100M is probably fine for some people who are just browsing the web. The big think it latency as some of those old copper connections are very painful.
I would stick with 1G and be done with it
This is a community for people who have home servers. 100M is fine for a couple people just web browsing, but that’s not the topic of this discussion.
I run 10G between my desktop and my server because I can easily saturate a 1G connection doing a simple file transfer.
Yeah, 100M is a no-go for me since my ISP provides much more than 100M, and streaming full-res videos would bottleneck that pretty quick.
1G is probably fine for us, but we’ll probably go 2.5G minimum the next time I need to swap out switches, maybe 10G.
