Creating the ultimate home network (With barely any money) part 1 of many

Networking Networking Hardware
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To start I will give some background: I have no money, I am a student, and I act accordingly. This includes getting my media from cough questionable locations, and that involves large files. Now I have 3 other family members that are constantly on YouTube and we all occupy the same router that we got from comcast, which has 5 Ghz on top of the 2.5, but the amount of devices just makes it all go to shit. Now due to the lack of aforementioned cash and a want for greater quality, coax to ethernet and power line are out of the question. From this I have come to the conclusion that an ethernet run is the most effective considering all of this, just putting in the run is phase 0.

phase 0 :
The cable I plan to work with:

So I measured out where along the base board it would travel and it came out to about 68 feet, the 7 feet of wiggle room should be enough to cover any error I have made in my measurements. Now I have considered using these command strips for the most effective and discrete mounting along with the included cable clips.

So once the run hits my room I already have a crappy 10/100 5 port cisco unmaneged switch that will allow me to split off the connection, however improvements to that will come.

phase 1 planning :

So I have an older lenovo x201 thinkpad that I nabbed from corporate surplus a couple years ago. Since then it was partially used as my daily driver until I upgraded, now it sits on the ground unused, now it has a purpose. With the infrastructure pre existing at this point with having the discrete run in place, I plan to put use the laptop as a pf Sense box at the end of the line which will proceed to hook into the modem. At this phase I plan to just use a usb to ethernet adapter to get the other interface I need to use in order to get the hardwired connection through the laptop to take advantage of caching and such. Now the adapter is only the beginning, once I get the cash I plan to get an express card to pci e adapter and then install a gigabit network card in there.

Now with that said, my question to the forum is can I use the network card over the express card and get the performance bump with the interface speed to the caching, general internet speed with upload/download, and other devices I have connected to the laptop directly or will the express card make that benefit null and void?

edit 1: will be posting pictures as things develop

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I recommend getting a non-flat cat6a cable if your buying these days, its not only more mechanically durable, it supports 10gig in theory., and I recommend more wiggle room than that to let you work with it later. If you end up putting the end points on top of a table shelf you want it to reach while dropping dead to the floor, not pulling tension. Cat6a 100 foot cable on amazon, though you may get a better price looking around more: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Snagless-Shielded-Ethernet/dp/B00HEM653S/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1504067834&sr=1-3&keywords=cat6a%2Bethernet%2Bcable&th=1

Otherwise totally use what ever crappy gear you can beg, borrow or steal (really, I raid bins when offices dump stuff, which is technically theft here, though don’t take things people actually want, thats bad). 100 megabit sounds slow, but most of your network traffic tends to be internet access in a home environment anyway, so it’ll do till you can upgrade.

If your expresscard is running in USB2.0 mode, that will limit bandwidth, but if it has PCIe, and the card you get uses that, then even at the lowest end it can do 1.6 gigabit per second, or 3.2Gbps in PCIe2.0 or USB3.0 mode. The X201 supports expresscard 2.0 in its 54mm slot, so a single gigabit is possible (make sure the card you buy is PCIe though), however the x200 does not. Also keep in mind you can use 34mm in 54mm slots, so something like this would do you: https://www.amazon.com/ExpressCard-34-Gigabit-LAN-port/dp/B005645INO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1504070784&sr=8-3&keywords=gigabit+expresscard

As an aside, levenno says the x201 has a single gigabit ethernet port, so you can use that for your LAN traffic to switch (which is important once its no longer a 100Mbit item) and use any random usb2.0 ethernet adapter to connect to your WAN, as it won’t bottleneck you unless your lucky enough to have a internet connection faster than the real world 240Mbps of USB2.0. DO NOT get a USB3.0 version to use in a USB2.0 port as it may not work as happened to me once before, but such a USB2,0 adapter can be found under $5 on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/ABC-Ethernet-Adapter-1000Mbps-Drive/dp/B017N7DB12/ref=sr_1_11?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1504069694&sr=1-11&keywords=usb+2+ethernet

Also the thinkpad is probably fast enough to be your long term solution (if the fan noise is a non-issue due to placement at least), as the mobile i5 will handle more than just routing, it’s got the power and Intel AES New Instructions do up to about 100Mbit Snorp or Secura if you need, or (XOR, probably not both) do a second task like as a IP camera security DVR. The internal disk is also attached via Sata2, so it’ll do up to 375 MegaBytes per Second disk access, so if you want to be keeping extenvise logs or video data, it will will happily keep up with a huge hard drive like you can pull out of this enclosure on amazon (and put your existing HDD inside for backup use) or its smaller brothers (the 1tb is $60): https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Portable-External-STDR5000100/dp/B01LZP2B23/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1504069433&sr=8-11&keywords=5tb+hard+drive

You can even get a 2nd HDD going for more storage or redundancy using an adapter to replace the CD drive you won’t need: https://www.amazon.com/Highfine-Universal-SSD-HDD-Enclosures/dp/B01MRI8YFN/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1504070415&sr=8-4&keywords=laptop+cd+to+sata

Do be aware of spending too much money trying to make old gear something its not though, at some point it becomes economical to look at the passively cooled SOC systems around $100usd as they use less power\no noise and have multiple gigabit ports from factory, or even at hardware designed as a router. https://www.aliexpress.com/category/70803003/mini-pc.html

All these things I list new for convenience, but scrounging you can find a working alternative for much less. Best of luck with the project!

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Can you scrounge up a wrt610n or a wrt1043nd? you can use them as VLAN/managed switches and setup your pfSense as a router-on-a-stick.

What do you have doing your WiFi now?

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I recommend buying a spool of CAT6 as its usually around 50$ and gives you 1000ft. You need the tools but it comes in so much handy.

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Cat6 isn’t the same as Cat6a, you’ll want the later as the former offers very limited advantage of Cat5e for the average consumer instead of the 10 gigabit potential future upgrade path. At the current time 10 gig is much too expensive for switches ect still in my mind, but even now its very practible for a single link desktop to NAS ect (or even NAS to switch if it has a SFP+ port and enough clients to justify it), and prices for 10gig gear will fall with time.

Also honestly if you only need the one long link, its probably not worth it to buy a spool, connectors, tools and (possibly make) a tester vs just buying a 100ft… although if your wanting a few runs or needing to push cable through tight spaces it does become economical fairly rapidly, and is easy to learn in a day or two while being a good skill to have.

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Currently for wifi we have the re-branded cisco router from comcast, I don’t have the specfics right now, however all I can tell you is that it is a WiFi router modem combo that supports 5 Ghz.

I don’t have much experience in getting surplus network gear and things like open wrt, are these the ones that have the capacity for flash cards? Even if I can get these incredibly cheap I want the power that the i5 provides and the potential of an ssd, even at sata 2 speeds and just have dumb switches do the rest.

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It would be the best in my scenario to get a flat white cable as my apartment was built in the late 80s and isn’t wired for Ethernet and I rent to running a cable through the walls would be hell, so I will be running things along the base board and under doors, I would think that if I had a thinner cable that snagging along the quarter inch of clearance it provides wouldn’t be a problem.

So the flat cat 6a cable doesn’t? Laying the cable now is intended to serve for years, and if I could have future capacity built in than sign me up.

I was under the impression that it was 100 Mbps.

I also thought that I couldn’t run gigabit with usb 2.0, this is great as I planned to overbuy greatly with a pci to express card adapter

Do I need lots of storage if I am caching video? I thought that if I had a kind dian SSD that it would cache fine, however if I want to cache all the things, do I need more storage than a 60 gigabyte ssd?

the x201 lacks a dvd drive, I wish I could use an ultrabay adapter.

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I have considered getting something smaller in @SheepInACart’s recommendation of cat 6a, once I get all the breakout stuff put in place it would just be cheaper to crimp my own cables going to the devices I want.

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The cable you linked isn’t cat 6a, its cat6, which didn’t include 10gig in its design spec… however with “quality connections” and shorter distances it may be up rated to it. So the amazon special is only a 50/50 it’ll work at 10gig, maybe less. If you can find a reliable source that sells flat white cat6A then that’ll be rated for 10Gig at 100m (>330ft) as well, although tend to be less durable.

As for the onboard ethernets speed, my reading says of the leveno detailed specifications page reads: “1Gb Ethernet installed on systems via the system board”, although you can check yourself in case I’m reading up on the wrong product or similar.

https://support.lenovo.com/au/en/solutions/pd010141

You can run Tbase1000 over USB adapters just fine, but keep in mind you still need to get the data between NIC and PC, so your going to be limited to 240 megabits not 1000 megabits… but its still 2.4x the bandwidth for like $2 more in the adapter. Having said that, you can get gigabit express cards like the one I linked for only $7 more again ($12 total), so depending on if you actually benefit from having over 240Mbps on that connection it may be the better option…

If your just caching web traffic any SSD is heaps of storage, the video I mentioned was DVR duty with IP cams OR the complete traffic logs for security. The Kingfast F6 is a little cheaper tha the KingDian, for 60gb, but I have not used either to say how reliable it is.

As for CD… thats my stuff up… I missed the line above that said inside ultra bay… its a shame though as it does limit you to the 1 drive since you don’t have other fast I/O like USB3.0 to hang external devices off of.

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I know that their is USB 3.0 adapters for expresscard, so maybe I could utilize the pci throughput via one of those cards and then plug in usb 3.0 ethernet adapters? The reason I want to have everything be 1 Gb is because I plan in the future to use the improved through put to put in an odroid single board computer to function as a media computer and stream all my media from a server in my room, and to also install a bunch of emulators along with either nvidia gamestream or steam in home streaming

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The reason why you don’t want to get flat cables is that they typically succumb to more resitance, causing issues in longer runs.

UTP is unshielded twisted pair; they are twisted for a reason. If you do get a flat cable make sure it is STP (shielded twisted pair)

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That will work, you may only still get 2.5bps bandwidth between both the ports, not 5Gbps limit from USB3.0. This is still fine for 2 Gigabit adapters (or one and a connection to externally powered spinning rust) but don’t expect to run other things at the same time. Also the drivers are hard to sort out( though possible) and also the power delivery is not what real USB3.0 should be, so don’t plug anything with current draw in without a host cable. For the low budget you can get this: https://www.amazon.com/Hanerdun-Express-Chipset-Converter-Superspeed/dp/B00J9PAZIO/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1504108415&sr=8-5&keywords=usb3+expresscard

IF the inbuilt port is gigabit (easy to test, just plug it to another gigabit device and look in your network settings) then I’d personally just use the direct adapter for one gigabit NIC (for some reason duel NIC cards are >$100) as it’ll be cheaper, neater and easier to set up in software. If not then the USB3.0 route is your best option… and was very good thinking BTW. https://www.amazon.com/ExpressCard-34-Gigabit-LAN-port/dp/B005645INO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1504070784&sr=8-3&keywords=gigabit+expresscard

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That is the device I was thinking about, it gives me the speed I need in a smaller formfactor without having to go through the shit show of setting up a pci device, now that being said how bad would the driver situation be on pf sense with the expresscard to usb 3.0 adapter?

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found a better (albeit more expensive) cable that definitely supports 10 gig and has all the mounting equipment I need.

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you could them as managed, VLAN capable, gigabit switches, yes, they can route or do something else too, but are old and slow I wouldn’t recommend it. (you can still ssh into them in a pinch), and they do have a USB ports where you can attach a flash drive or a hard drive, but again, they’d be slow but could be useful in a pinch depending on how much other stuff you have (think, backup router when your pfSense power supply dies).

for about the same price as a new 5 port unmanaged switch - they’d be a better buy

Examples off of ebay:

you might be able to find one locally in a recycling center maybe or somewhere like that, you can find the details for various devices on wikidevi.com as well as in LEDE sources (https://github.com/lede-project/source/tree/master/target/linux) just search the repo for the model number.

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Oh shit, didn’t realize that they were under $10, you also must realize the laptop functioning as a pfsense router is just the cherry on top, I could do everything I want with two dummy switches, however adding in pf sense gives me so much more in terms of an open vpn server and large amounts of caching. Now that being said I will totally buy one of these as they are cheaper and I do have more features as you said previously I can just hook one of these up as a VLAN and access my media server more effectively remotely.

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What is the comcast speed you get and are all the family members using wifi ? If it’s wifi congestion then just the cat5 cable will fix you up. If you’re hitting bandwidth limits from comcast then pfsense giving yourself bandwidth will only make the family not be able to stream youtube etc without constant buffering.