Some IT guy, IDK.
You know, there’s good people on both sides. People with a lot of value and good ideas. It reminds me of my businesses, so many good people. There’s a lot of good people in this world. You know what else is good? Watermelon. It’s a melon… Made… From water. How incredible. It’s delicious. How do they do that?
I moved my DNS to a pair of raspberry Pi 3’s running bind, with a DNS stub zone for my homelab domain that points to my homelab DNS servers.
That way the internet keeps working whether my homelab works or not. Keeps the wife aggro down.
You can do whatever you want. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s “wrong”. A big part of homelabbing is to try stuff. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine, you learned something, and that was the point.
For me, I don’t see a UPS as essential. It’s generally a good idea, but not strictly essential. My servers are on 24/7, because I have services that do things overnight for me. I also know that some people access my lab when I’m not awake, so I just leave it on so it can be ready for anything at any time. It poses some unique challenges sometimes when running stuff that’s basically 24/7/365.
Be safe, have fun, learn stuff.
Yep, I’m sure they do.
Realistically, does any average consumer know what’s on which circuit?
Spanning the split phase will screw you up, across breakers won’t be fun but shouldn’t pose any serious problems, as long as it’s not in different sides of the split phase.
I’m pretty sure they say this because actually explaining what will work and what won’t either requires significant prior knowledge of power systems, or a couple of paragraphs of explainers before you can get a rough picture of what the hell they’re driving at.
Everyone I know who has used powerline, just plug it in and see if it works. Those who were lucky, say it’s great and works without issue, etc. Those who were not lucky say the opposite.
I’m just over here watching the fireworks, eating popcorn.
I’ve been doing IT work for more than a decade, I was a nerd/“computer guy” well before that. I’ve had a focus on networking in the past 15-20 years. You learn a few things.
I try to be humble and learn what I can where I can, I know that I definitely do not know everything about it, and at the same time I try to be generous and share what I’ve learned when I can.
So if you have questions, just ask. I either already know, or I can at least point you in the right direction.
It definitely sounds like you have some challenges ahead. I personally prefer MoCA over wireless, simply because you can control what devices are able to be a part of the network, and reduce the overall interference from external sources and connections.
With WiFi, being half duplex, only one station can transmit at a time (with come caveats). Whether that station is a part of your network, or it is simply operating on the same frequency/channel, doesn’t matter. So in high density environments, you can kind of get screwed by neighbors.
MoCA is also half duplex (at least it was the last time I checked) so having a 2.5G MoCA link, to a 1GbE connection (on the ethernet side) should provide similar, or the same experience as pure ethernet (1G full duplex)… The “extra” bandwidth on the MoCA will allow for each station to send and receive at approximately 1Gbps without stepping on eachother so much that you have degraded performance.
However, it really depends on your situation to say what should or shouldn’t be setup. I don’t know your bandwidth requirements, so I can’t really say. The nice thing about ethernet is that it on switched networks (which is what you’ll be using for gigabit), the. Ethernet kind of naturally defaults to the shortest path, unless you’re doing something foolish with it (like intentionally messing with STP to push traffic in a particular direction). The issue with that is that ethernet doesn’t really scale beyond a few thousand nodes. Not an issue for even a fairly large LAN, but that’s the reason we don’t use it for internet (wan side) traffic routing. But now I’m off topic.
Given the naturally shortest-path behavior of ethernet, of you have a switch in your office and you only really use your NAS from your office PC, you’ll have a full speed experience. If nothing else needs high-speed access to the NAS, you’ll be fine.
Apart from the NAS or any other LAN resources, the network should be sufficient to fully saturate your internet connection. So the average WiFi speeds should be targeted towards something faster than your internet link (again, half duplex factors in here). I don’t know your internet speed so I’m not going to even guess what the numbers should be, but I personally aim for double my internet speed for maximum throughput on my WiFi as much as I can. The closer you can get to doubling your internet speed here, the better. Anything more than that will likely be wasted.
There’s a ton to say about WiFi and performance optimization, but I’ll leave it alone unless you ask about it further.
Good luck.
It can be faster, it really depends on whether you have a clear-ish channel for the mesh, which is why I would recommend something on the higher end, hopefully with a dedicated radio for mesh, so it can be on a different channel with (hopefully) less interference.
If the mesh radio is shared with client access, or if it’s on a busy channel, it may be much, much slower than some options.
Hello friend.
You can get 2.5gbps MoCA now. You may want to consider upgrading.
Nice username btw
Depending on where you live and what your power circuits look like (not the outlets, the circuits that power them), you may have a great, or very poor experience.
I’d need to know what country you live in to know more, since power wiring standards vary from country to country. In the USA and Canada (I’m in Canada and the USA is the same), we use split phase and crossing the split phase will severely hinder the ability for powerline to perform.
It’s a viable option, not my favorite option, I’d recommend MoCA (coax) over powerline, but it’s ultimately up to you.
IMO, powerline is going to depend on a lot of factors including what kind of power you use, which varies from country to country. Where I am in North America, we use 240v split phase, and the powerline adapters are 120v (half phase), so if one unit ends up on one side of the phase, and one ends up on the other side of the phase, you’re going to have a bad time, if it links at all… So knowing which “side” of the split phase your powerline is on becomes critical, which is not something most people know about their power situation. As a result, it’s basically a crap shoot whether it will work well or not.
I have three suggestions for you.
Easy mode: find a triple radio mesh wifi system and get at least two nodes. Generally the LAN Jack on the satellite nodes will bridge to the LAN over WiFi. Just add a switch and use it normally. This will harm your overall speeds when connecting to the NAS from other wired LAN systems that are not on the same switch. I’m not sure if that’s important. As long as your internet speed is less than half of your WiFi speed, you shouldn’t really notice a difference.
Medium mode: buy MoCA adapters and use coax. Just be sure to get relatively new ones. They’re generally all 1G minimum, but usually half duplex, so there’s still sacrifice there, but MoCA is generally better than WiFi. The pinch is making sure you stop the MoCA signal from exiting your premise. You don’t want to tap into someone else’s MoCA network, nor have them tap into yours. There are cable filters that will accomplish this, or you can air gap the coax. I’m not sure how much control you have for the ingress/egress of your coax lines. You can yolo it and just hope for the best, but I can’t recommend that.
Hard mode: do ethernet anyways. Usually in rentals, nobody can complain with holes in the walls the size you would get from nails to hand pictures, not much larger than a picture hanging nail, is a cup hook. What I did at my old place, which was a rental, was to buy large cup hooks, and put them every ~18" down the hallway, and load it with ethernet cables. I used adhesive cable runners to go down walls near doors and ran the cables under doors to get from room to room. I got lucky that two adjacent rooms shared a phone jack and I replaced the faceplate with a quad port Keystone faceplate on each side. One Keystone was wired to the phone line to keep existing functionality, the rest were connected to eachother though the wall as ethernet, and I just patched one side to the other (on one side was the core switch for my network). That was my experience, obviously your experience will be different. I used white ethernet to try to blend it in with the ceiling/walls which were off-white. In my situation, I was on DSL and used the phone jack in one of the bedrooms for my internet connection, that bedroom was used as an office and it neighbored my bedroom where I used the jack to jack connections through the wall to feed my TV and other stuff in the bedroom. The ethernet on the cup hooks went from the office to the living room where I put a second access point (first ap was on the office) and TV and other stuff. Inbetween the bedrooms and the living room was the kitchen and the wet wall was basically RF blocking, so I needed an access point on either side, so one in the office near the bedroom and bathroom, and one in the living room, provided plenty of coverage for the ~900sqft apartment we were renting. Most everything was on wired ethernet, and the WiFi was used mainly by laptops and cellphones.
I live by the philosophy of wired when you can, wireless when you have to. Mainly to save WiFi channels and bandwidth for devices that don’t have an easy alternative option like mobile phones and portable computers.
I don’t think you’re in a bad spot OP, and any of these choices should be adequate for your needs, but that will vary depending on what speed internet you have, and how much speed you need for the LAN (to the NAS and between systems).
Good luck.
As an armchair economist, lots of things. Loss of money from workers standing around unable to do their jobs because of the technical issues, the cost of doing a restore from backup (technician time, extra help, direct costs of accessing the data), etc. Opportunity costs from having to send business away, or otherwise unreasonably delay taking/delivering orders that have either been given to competitors or cancelled because of the issues.
Even the dang electricity costs of keeping the lights on while waiting for a fix…
Large companies calculate this value as a “burn rate”, which is to say, how much is it directly or indirectly costing to have everyone here, ready to work, and unable to do so because of an issue that affects everyone. Usually measured in dollars per hour. So if their burn rate is 100k/hr, and it takes 10 hours to fix the problem, it’s ~$1M in losses.
They may be able to recoup some of those losses by adding an extra shift or granting overtime to catch up, but for the most part, a large percent of that money is simply gone.
My only argument is in the idea of finding which device has a particular IP address.
Guess you’re running laps around the campus staring at pegs for a while to figure out which one it is.
You’re probably right. It’s the same way that circumcision is so common in other places. It’s so assumed that you almost have to tell them not to do it, or they’ll just go ahead and do it… Except in most civilized countries you need authority to do a thing, so the question is always asked if that’s what the parents want. They don’t have to ask about it, it’s basically assumed that they want it, and the doctors need to ask so that they have legal protections in case something happens.
Whelp, that’s barbaric.
I was considering saying something about the law maybe being to restrictive, and that if people with vaginas want to have the procedure, they should be allowed to have it if they choose to, but in every other case, it’s banned, but the whole thing about the clit really turned me around on it.
Cosmetic surgery to reduce the labia is a thing, and such surgery should be entirely voluntary for the individual it will affect, but just hacking and slashing to the point where it’s common to cut away the clit is just… No.
Ban ban ban ban ban. I don’t even have a vagina and fuck that. It’s shameful enough that anyone performed that kind of mutilation, don’t backslide into ignorance by lifting the ban on it.
I mean, this is a constant problem with legislation. This, and enforcement.
You make it illegal to do something because we need to protect the children and only those willing to break the rules will be able to deliver on the thing that people want.
This already happened recently to smoking, specifically vaping, and I’m all too familiar with the arguments. But if I can take an example from vaping… They wanted to outlaw flavors, and largely failed. Bluntly, there’s already laws, which lack any semblance of effective enforcement, which prohibits people who are underage from buying, owning and using any tobacco products… More or less, depending on your specific country/state/province/region/county/whatever. But history has shown that tobacco products end up in the hands of underage people regardless of this. Whether because the cashier at the local smoke/vape/whatever shop or convenience store or gas station or whatever, didn’t give enough of a flying fuck to deny someone because they “did not have their ID with them” or didn’t even care enough to bother asking for it. I can’t blame them, pissing off a passing customer who might be armed, could be violent, may have anger, violence, or homicidal issues, just because some fat fuck behind a desk says no, risking the rare chance that the person could be participating in an investigation which will result in a “hefty” (though not hefty) fine at worst, one which they won’t have to pay, doesn’t really give the best motivation for giving any shits about the law.
But upstanding law abiding organizations trying to do their best to comply with the laws are punished by trying to make these fuckers happy. It’s not worth the trouble.
In the case of vaping, black market/street vapes have no regulation to protect the users. I followed almost every case of “vaping caused x respiratory problem for this person”, and in every instance that I could track beyond the initial report, it was discovered that the individuals were buying their shit from illegal operations, who put God knows what additives into the shit they sell, and frequently, if I could get enough information on it, the result was that some bullshit illegal additive caused the problem, not the legit ingredients that are supposed to be in a vape, as governed by law. Those additives have no place being inhaled, and for good reason, they damage your lungs. But mass media’s one-and-done style of reporting, never, ever, fucking follows up and the public who don’t bother doing any goddamned research of their own start to think all vaping products are bad because reasons.
To bring it back on point. Sites like porn hub, have benign ads. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the bullshit ads at one point or another that seem to rip you out from where you’re browsing and they take over your screen with some crap like “you have a virus, call our (scam) center to fix it”… On legitimate websites (pornhub included) these ads don’t exist. If you spend as much time on shady websites as I do, you would know that such browser hijacks still exist. The only thing this law will do is make it extremely difficult to use any legitimate website, pushing people to use less reputable sources for their porn, and leading them right into the waiting arms of scammers and con-artists. This kind of idiotic policy erodes public safety.
IMO, this shit is happening and keeps happening because the law makers are ignorant of how this shit actually works, they don’t understand behavioral patterns, and the media reinforces their fears and the fears of their constituents with their one-and-done sensationalist news stories that never get any kind of follow up.
I’m suggesting that my “investment budget” is nothing.
I think this one flew right over your head.
Specifically, I’m making light of the fact that no matter how hard I try to make a living wage, I still struggle to make everything work, indirectly shedding light on the recent discussions about stagnant wages and out of control inflation, raising costs to live while providing me no means by which to afford those increases.
Most months I barely have enough left over to buy myself a single meal at a restaurant as a once-a-month treat, nevermind have money set aside for retirement or have an “investment budget”.
Okay, a small percentage of nothing is…
At home, libreNMS. Just SNMP everything.
For work, whatever the tool of the day is from management.
You’re right. I should try harder to be stupid if I’m going to impersonate the Don.