I’m just going to be vulnerable for a minute here. I met the first person in real life who had similar server-y linux-y obsessions to me and we’d send eBay links of systems to drool over to eachother. They ended up being a terrible person but hid it from me pretty well until they couldn’t anymore and now I no longer have someone to chat with about those things.
So um, I guess I’m open for applications for the position of “nerdy friend who I nerd too hard with about network infrastructure and Linux packages” now
Edit: Autocorrect errors manually corrected
So with the way my house is laid out it and the difficulty in running network cables it would really make sense to put the server rack in the spider-filled basement, and a network switch on each floor. But while thinking about cost effective ways to achieve that (including use of the long distance stacking feature of the classic Brocade ICX switches or just running some of those Chinese 2.5G softrouter boxes) I keep coming back to this idea of instead setting up a BGP routed WAN or similar.
By running redundant cables I gain resilience against the chaos I live in (multiple kids and pets plus pretty frequently reorganizing furniture to get all of us to fit comfortably in our 1200 square foot starter house) plus by using a routing protocol like BGP it should do some amount of load balancing to allow more bandwidth between clients (I find peer to peer network technologies super neat so i love experimenting with them) but the thought also comes to use those Microtik router cards for even more bandwidth
Honestly it’s a lot of ideas I’ve been bouncing around while my family spends all of my hobby money on things like mini vacations that we can all enjoy
Sounds like you absolutely should run a lot of redundant cables and making sure your house is a micro-internet.
At my (allmost 100 years old. Built in 1929) house there are two chimneys that are no longer in use, so I use them for cable runs. My server room is in yhe basement, so all of the wired stuff is there. From a PoE switch I have cables going into the chimney, going to each floor for powering access points.
I’m sure that my kids will want wired network, so at that point I’ll replace the top floor AP with a switch, and use the associated chimney-cable as VLAN trunk instead.
Right now my biggest annoyance is that I want to replace my ISPs router with something rack mounted. Their Tilgin router/modem is the only part of the network that is not compatible with a 19" rack.
You can say what you want about Fortinet, but I kinda like them, and after replacing the work networks with cloud managed routers I have quite a few Fortigate 101E left over. If I keep them up to date I should be fine.
My go-to switches are Aruba of various sorts. I have two 2930M and one 3810M. Also leftovers from work after going for something cloudanaged.