I’m looking for recommendations for setting up 10Gbe home network as it likely we’ll have full 1gig fiber Internet in a few months. My current setup is unlikely to be able to to take full advantage of those speeds and I like the idea of futur-proofing my backbone.
My fire wall is a 6x1Gbe device, so lagging them together would allow it to keep up, but that means any switch needs to be L3 and be fully Lagg compatible to be useful now. Any one any recommendations. I’m in the UK as well, not sure it’d make much difference to what’s available or not.
I was looking at the MikroTik myself. I recently bought a house in a location with 1Gb fiber up/down. I built a 1Gb router that works really well, and I think I’m going to grab two MikroTik switches to connect my officer to the closet I plan to stuff my NAS into a rack in a closet.
I only have ITX board right now, so I’m likely going to upgrade my AMD workstation to a G chip so I can replace the video card with a 10G and pull the SATA card out of the NAS, switch to onboard and do the same.
I don’t want to get a fuser and do the whole fiber splicing thing, so I was thinking of getting those wall jacks that are just couplers:
length is not much of an issue here since its fiber. decent couplers work just fine. The challenge will be pulling the fiber. How do you plan to run it, what is it going through and how many bend’s and of what radius are the bends?
Fiber really does not like to be pulled because it can cause fractures, which cause reflections, and reduce light. Thats why when you run new fiber you use the strength member to do the pulling. Its (depending on the type of fiber) either a Kevlar string, or with outdoor/armoured fiber a steel weave or rod.
Preterminated cables are fine, they are just harder to run because you have to pull at each bend so you dont strain the cable. Meaning if I was pulling from my basement to my attic, I would do that pull first, and pull all the fiber I need for the rest of the pull, then pull to the next bend. Again pull all the remaining fiber, and repeat until you get to the destination. You really cant pull fiber past more than 1 bend.
Thanks for the advice all. I may have to rework my setup a bit, so as nit to try and load the major parts of the NAS access through the router, keeping direct on the switch, but I’ll likely look at getting one of the MikroTik switches and some SPF+ or other 10 gig nics on my work station and NAS.
I can definitely recommend the mikrotik sfp+ switch, and eBay mellanox connectx3 cards (make sure they are Ethernet not infiniband). I use Finistar transceivers without issues.
I’ve had a 10G network for quite a few years now, and it’s been great, and too affordable to not implement.
Yep, I have a 1g fiber connected directly to a PFSense running on a micro Dell that I added a 2nd NIC to. That plugs into my Mikrotik CRS328-24P-4S+RM which provides me 4x SFP+ 10G ports.
I will probably be getting the 16 port 10G version soon since I am in need of at least 2 more and I would hate to get an 8 and fill that up.
I am running a Mikrotik fibre setup at home. My internet connection is 400mbps symmetrical. I would recommend it as the easiest way to get into fibre and since I am doing IoT things managed locally in the house, things get very chatty. being able to segregate the networks and increase machine to machine throughput is really nice. Plus, with the way that TV and Display standards are increasing, I have extra fibre wired in the hose for when the normal consumer devices switch to optical from copper.
