My Intel X520 card have arrived and have been far better than expected. They’re both like new, one even has the LP bracket with it and all 4 Intel SFP’s are like brand new. I moved both my LAN and WAN interfaces to the R210’s onboard coppers and installed the new card, connected up with a temporary fibre patch cable and it came straight up. LAN moved back onto the 10Gb along with the VLAN’s and we are now live with 10Gb Firewall>Switch>CaveSwitch – Complete 10Gb backbone.
Will it make a difference day to day? Nope. But it’s been an itech I’ve been dying to scratch and now I have a spare X520 to install into the backup server and get rid of the 4 ether LACP.
I’ve ran a 10Gb link from Attic to ManCave for quite a while now and it’s always been in the back of my mind to stretch it out a little bit more. The unRAID server now using a 2.5Gb into the Cave switch eased things a bit however I have just managed to win an auction for two Intel 10Gb PCIe SFP+ cards with SFP+’s so the plan is to put one in the Dell firewall so we have 10Gb Firewall to Attic Switch and then I’ll still have a spare whih may go in the unRAID box or it may go in the Backup Box.
I was recently caught out by the whole pfSense+ is going to be chargeable going forwards scandal that I’m sure many other pfSense users have been, I’ve kerbed my outrage, it’s not life ending, I moved from CE to Plus only a month before this happened and to be honest, apart from the inconvenience of reinstalling to move back – I can live with it howevere there is a similar alternative, a fork of the pfSense build. OPNsense. Link to said announcement.
What a nightmare that’s been!! I had it in my mind to swap the SSD my Dell R210 was running on anyway so whipped out the old Crucial and popped in a new one, installed OPN sense and that’s where the problems all started! Huge memory spikes (filling the 8GB hardware and 8GB swap), the firewall then proceeded to drop some services due to the memory being so high, CPU spiking to 60% plus randomly for periods. VLANs not working and I use a LAGG setup for my downlinks to LAN (I can so I do) also not coming up when needed meaning I had a situation where I managed to lock myself out due to the LAGG not coming up, a reset to factory and then start config again. Just a general nightmare.
Sat contemplating my poor life decisions, I remebered I swapped out the SSD in full, what had taken me the best part of 2 and a half hours, was reverted in a shutdown, SSD swap and power up (30 seconds max) to resume normality. Yes I have a CE reinstall to do and it does bug me I never get 1Gb any more only 850Mb (first world problem) but I am going to concentrate now on moving the interfaces to the built in ethernet and swap out the PCiE card for something 10Gb flavour.
I have read so much up on moving pf to opn and I was super excited to do so but pf for me is currently still where it’s at.
More like sold them all but I’m no longer running the UAP-AC-Pro’s. As far as performance went, they worked fine, I had 3 in total, 1 in the loft space for the main house, 1 in the mancave and 1 out at the MIL’s who is on a UBNT wireless bridge for some free and easy coverage. I can’t really fault the UAP’s, the coverage was good and speeds were always plenty for what I needed.
Why Then? I’ve fairly recently extended my house and needed to add another AP. For my work I use the very versatile Zyxel Nebula range and it just made sense to “hop” brand and move over. The Zyxel kit comapritively is slightly cheaper and I made the step over onto ax hardware being as I’ve gone Gig at home now as well.
Step in the Zyxel NWA50AX – The main reasons for using this AP are, primarily I work with this kit every day so why wouldn’t you? It’s WiFi6 capable so as devices are swapped out I can eek more performance out of the WiFi, they don’t require me to maintain a controller, Zyxel do all of this for you, the cost point on these is brilliant. I picked up 4 AP’s at a cost of £69 each and overall I have more coverage of the house and far better throughputs and finally the performance, my thorughput is noticabely higher now than it was running the old setup. This is likely in part due to now having 2 AP’s serviing the house rather than 1 but overall I’m very happy!
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