Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
As many of you would have seen, Lemmy 0.19 is out. I know many are upgrading and many (like lemmy.world) have said they will hold off until after Christmas. I will probably test it out this week and see how I go for time. The pictrs 0.5 release hasn’t come out yet, and I’m keen to do that as it has many more options for the image cache (such as the option to not storing the cached images in full resolution forever). If that comes out soon we might do one update with both. But there will be a decent chunk of downtime, especially with the pictrs update. An hour maybe.
And in other news I decided I probably need a network switch for home, as I’m running things on wifi that should be on ethernet because I have no more ports in the router.
I searched up switches, saw the top result cost $1,500, and suddenly realised I have no idea what I’m doing.
Anyone got suggestions? Does a switch create it’s own network or can I bridge it to the existing one?
Hey - i’ve worked as a networking engineer for the last 15 odd years, so can probably assist :)
To give a good recommendation it’d help to know what stuff you have at home, how many devices, how far apart are they etc and what they are etc? Is it spread around the house, or mostly one room; and if the latter, do you have, or have room for a rack (of any size)?
There’s all sorts of things a switch can do, it can be a Layer 3 switch and so do its own network/routing, or be a lot dumber and just extend a network you already have. It really depends what you buy & what you’re plugging it into, and then how you end up configuring it.
Maybe for a bit of context for where i’m coming from, here’s a rough description of my setup:
I have a couple of wireless access points, and a handful of network video cameras. Then, the usual domestic stuff - laptops, tablets, phones, tvs. After that, the less usual stuff, an unRaid box, a handful of raspberry Pis, a cluster of little EliteDesk Minis, and a bunch of esp32 based sensors.
For me, with the cameras & access points, it made sense to have something that was PoE capable. And because of the variety of things I have I wanted to be able to securely segment them at layer 3. I also wanted to be able to access stuff remotely so needed something that could work as a firewall as well. And I didn’t want to pay any annual license fees or anything else, plus was on the bandwagon already.
So my network is quite simple, a UniFi UDM Pro, plus a USW 16. I have it in a small comms rack that sits under a desk as the only longish device is the unRaid box nothing else is deeper than a half depth on a normal rack.
I’ve got a UDM pro at home as well, currently just running two WAPs, but we plan to add cameras in the future when funds allow.
It’s a brilliantly simple piece of kit.
Current setup:
- Desktop tower attached to TV
- Old Raspberry Pi for Pi Hole
- Newish Raspberry Pi for Home Assistant
- Old laptop as server for self hosting other stuff
- Mesh wifi network with two access points connected over ethernet
This is just the stuff I’d like over ethernet. Currently everything is together in the TV cabinet (except one of the mesh access points) but probably ideally the desktop stays with the TV and the rest are parked somewhere more out of sight.
In your other comment you also mentioned cameras, we currently have none but I like the look of that setup where it messages you that a car just pulled into your driveway or a person is at your door, etc. Frigate stuff. So it would be good to future proof for that sort of thing too!
Edit: Oh one thing to add, I have a spare ISP router. Can it be used as a switch?
Re the ISP router; yes sometimes they can be configured to just act as a switch, but I wouldn’t recommend it - can be a complete PITA to setup.
So looking at your current setup, you need 7-8 ports (one as backhaul to your router, possibly 1 extra for the TV); and for future growth you might need 1-4 more POE based ports for cameras. I’d recommend POE for Cameras & Access Points as it just makes installing them a hell of a lot easier.
You also don’t need any network segmentation by the sounds of things, everything can sit & talk together. What is your current router / internet gateway?
Just editing to add that Frigate is exactly what I use; and I love it apart from its integration with Home Assistant for notifications which i’ve struggled to break free from.
You also don’t need any network segmentation by the sounds of things, everything can sit & talk together.
Currently. However, I have stuff like Nextcloud and Jellyfin that I may want to expose publicly at some point (currently using Tailscale). If I do that and also have cameras on the same network that starts to sound like a bad idea. Maybe segregating the network is a good idea?
What is your current router / internet gateway?
It’s an ISP Huawei router. This is then plugged into a Ubiquiti Amplifi mesh base station, and then other things plus into either the router of the base station. The router and mesh setup have a bridged network so the router is the DCHP server for both (if I understand it correctly).
Just editing to add that Frigate is exactly what I use; and I love it apart from its integration with Home Assistant for notifications which I’ve struggled to break free from.
Do you know of any tutorials that tell you what to buy and how to set it up?
Ah cool - I basically access my home services in a similar way to you, I prefer to use the VPN as I don’t trust my knowledge to secure things sufficiently if I was actually making them exposed.
I’d guess your Huawei box has 4 LAN ports, one of which is connected to the Amplifi base station, and given that’s your wifi I don’t think there’s any need to worry about POE for the APs for now; that also reduces the ports you need down to 5-6 as well. The simplest thing to do for now is to just connect a switch into that and run with 1 VLAN until you need more.
Bang for buck, I like UniFi gear; its not fully featured for enterprise or business but does most of what you’d need. And there’s not a big difference between the 8 & 16 port options for the Lite models: https://www.pbtech.co.nz/search?sf=unifi+lite+switch&search_type= You’d just need to run the UniFi Network application on something in order to configure it.
Alternatively you can go for something even dumber, which has the advantage of it being even cheaper: https://www.pbtech.co.nz/category/networking/switches?fs=9326997
The frigate documentation is pretty good, even has a recommended hardware guide: https://docs.frigate.video/
Thanks! TBH I was expecting a switch to be kinda like an adapter or splitter, to find they were hundreds of dollars was a bit of a shock. What’s the (practical) difference between say this $70 switch and this $300 one? What am I getting for the extra $230, just PoE?
PoE adds a bunch to the cost, on pretty much any type of switch at any level. On some Enterprise gear for a 48 port switch it can sometimes be another $1k. Sometimes it’ll come down to how many ports provide power, and what PoE standards they support. The newer, higher voltage standards typically will cost more. But especially in Enterprise, PoE gives huge flexibility, mostly for Wireless Access Points these days, but used to be that every desk would have a phone powered from the switch as well.
Anywho, other than that; there really isn’t a massive difference between the two. Both will need something running the UniFi Network server for initial setup and management of them. It’d be an interesting experiment to see if they just worked without it though. Their management IP is usually a static in the 192.168.1.0/24 network and they default to using VLAN 1 for everything unless otherwise configured.
Alternatively you could meet in the middle and go with the Edge series from Ubiquiti, eg: https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/SWHUBI31306/Ubiquiti-EdgeSwitch-XP-ES-5XP-5-Port-Gigabit-Manag
These don’t require UniFi Network, you just log onto a web GUI to configure them which can be limited to only the MGMT port, and this particular model also does PoE, though probably only the older standard, not PoE+. I have one of them (the older version called ToughSwitch) and its been great. I’m pretty tempted to swap it for one of those Flex Mini’s though - as that way I can manage it from my UniFi setup rather than having to do it manually.
Actually just an edit to clarify the adapter/splitter… Back in the day you could buy a Hub, that’s closer to what I would call an adapter/splitter. The way they work is it effectively just turns one port into x ports, they’re a very dumb usually completely unconfigured device. But on a hub, all ports share the same collision domain so overall performance is weakened especially if you have a lot of devices connected to hubs.
In a switch each port is its own separate connection, and it’ll hold its own MAC address table to know how to get to things at layer 2. The difference is a hub is a bit like a party line (back in the analog days) where you could end up having one device talking over another. Whereas with a switch, every device has their own private line back to the cabinet.
Me"thinks its time to keep the Whitakers in the fridge.
I finally finished soldering and installing the retrocultmod for my guitar hero controller to install mechnical switches and a new pcb. Unfortunately when I plugged it into my computer it didnt worked cause something was shorting the circuit. I emailed the guy I brought the mod from and he pointed me in the right direction and I was able to clean up the wires and get it all working. Its so good to finally be playing clone hero with almost no latency. Before I was using the wireless ps3 controller which had terrible input lag and dropped inputs all the time.
Oh wow, is something like that difficult to do?
If you can solder its pretty easy. You buy the kit and open up the guitar and replace the insides.
But I hadn’t soldered before and instead of ordering the kit that requires minimal soldering I ended up getting the one that requires the most soldering. At least it was good practice. I feel comfortable soldering but I’m still dogshit at doing anything with stripping wires.
I’ve never really been one for Guitar Hero but hearing about this makes me want to have a go. Is this kit for nicer feeling buttons?
Yeah it changes the buttons from membrane to mechanical switches. It also changes the guitar from a wireless guitar using a shitty ps3 dongle to USB guitar that can be configured to use xinput or ps3, will,ps2,Xbox whatever you need it to be.
Can I assume you’re a champion at Clonehero? You seem pretty dedicated, like on the level of racing sim fans having a room setup with a whole kit for realism.
