Sweet, Sweet Overkill
There are lots of things I could say about my home network, I’ll probably say a lot of them in this post, but mostly I want to say that it is sweet, glorious overkill.
My network serves a couple of desktop computers, a few laptops, a handful of phones & tablets, smattering of IoT devices, a sprinkling of single board computers, & a modest 3 node Kubernetes (K8s) cluster [A short digression, Kubernetes is often shortened to K8s, 8 representing the 8 letters in between the K and s in Kubernetes. Digression done. See I told you it would be short]. Connecting it all together and to the larger internet I have a 26U rack. In the rack I have a pfSense firewall, a 48 port gigabit Brocade switch, an 8 port multi-gig Netgear switch, and for storage, a lovely 24-bay SuperMicro server running FreeNAS. Most of my infrastructure I acquired 2nd hand, but it still runs great and is fun to tinker with (The HDDs in my FreeNAS box were all new when I purchased them).
A diagram of my physical network looks something like this:
All the devices not pictured either connect wirelessly through the APs or are wired to the Brocade switch.
Now for some detailed specs:
- Firewall
- pfSense
- Intel® Atom™ D2500 CPU dual core @1.86GHz
- Intel® D2500CC Motherboard
- 4GB DDR3
- 2xIntel® 82574L Gigabit Ethernet
- Switch1
- Brocade ICX6610-48 48 port gigabit switch
- ISL
- currently the switches are just connected together via a single 1 gig Ethernet. I hope to connect them with 10 gig SFPs soon because fiber is awesome!
- Switch2
- Netgear MS510TXPP 8 port multigig smart managed pro with POE+ (this powers the APs)
- AP1
- Ubiquti UniFi AP-AC Pro
- AP2
- Ubiquti UniFi AP-AC Lite
- Storage
- FreeNAS
- SuperMicro SC846TQ-R900B Chassis w/ 24x 3.5” HDD bays (only 8 populated currently)
- SuperMicro MBD-H8DME-2-O
- 2x Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor 2372 HE @2.1GHz
- 32 GB RAM ECC DDR2
- Intel® EXPI9404PTL NIC in a 4gig LAG to the Brocade Switch
- On board NICs connected to the Brocade Switch as well, but not in the LAG
- IPMI Card
- 4x Seagate Ironwolf 6TB in RAID10
- 4x HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB also in RAID10
So there you have it. That’s my home network. As mentioned in a previous post, currently it is a flat network, but I’m working on fixing that. Maybe I’ll post some pictures some time, but killer cable management is on the to do list so I don’t think there is anything picture worthy yet.
Let me know what you think, if you want. I don’t wanna tell you how to live your life. I can barely manage my own. I don’t need the extra responsibility.
Remember, if something hasn’t gone wrong yet, you’re not trying hard enough.
-Nate