I’m in the process of designing a home server and am curious how many ethernet ports are required at minimum and how many people recommend. The single board computer (SBC) I plan to use has two built in and has a pcie slot to add four more if necessary. If I don’t need the four extra I’d like to use the pcie slot for a pcie Coral Edge TPU (preferred over the USB variant but still an option).

I expect to plan to use the server to connect to my home network so any device on the network via WiFi can access NextCloud. Besides that I want to use Frigate in another container for home video surveillance. I don’t know if I can or want to yet also add a Plex or Jellyfin instance to then connect to my TV or use a separate SBC for that.

What are your thoughts? I’m new to all of these things and just don’t want to waste money on the wrong hardware. Thanks!

  • thejevansEnglish
    14•1 year ago

    Off the top of my head, here are a few scenarios where you would like multiple network ports, none of which you are likely to need to worry about.

    1. You only have gigabit network devices, but you’re running a file server that you expect to often have multiple devices utilizing concurrently, so you connect all those devices to the same switch that the file server is plugged into and you implement bonding to increase the throughput to/from the server.
    2. You are virtualizing a router, so you need a WAN port as well as a LAN port.
    3. You have mostly gigabit devices, but you want a really fast connection between two servers or between your server and a workstation, so you add 10 Gbps or higher network cards to those machines and you connect them directly.
    4. You’re running a high-availability cluster and you want to use a ceph pool, so you use a second network port on each device for the ceph network.
    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      #1 seems like something I understand and could use but doubt I really need that. The other things you mention I don’t fully understand what they are and since you say I probably don’t need to worry about them then I won’t.

      I believe I’ll need to use a second port to add an ePOE hub for a few cameras though.

      Thank you!

      • @peregusEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        I would segregate the CCTV stuff on a separate VLAN since most likely it will be available from Internet. Since you are planning to use frigate and not connect directly to each single camera, place a firewall rule that block Internet access to them (or at least don’t add the gateway).

      • thejevansEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        I believe I’ll need to use a second port to add an ePOE hub for a few cameras though.

        You mean a POE network switch? You can run POE powered devices on the same network as everything else, so you don’t need an extra port for that.

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Specifically POE security cameras. So those can be connected to my all-in-one router and thus to my server running Frigate? That’s good to understand. Thank you

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            They can only be connected to your router if the router has POE support. If it doesn’t, you will need a separate switch that has POE ports. Many POE cameras etc are sold with power injectors. You plug the Ethernet from the router into the injector, plug the injector into a wall outlet, then run Ethernet from the injector to the device. If you don’t want to get a whole new switch with POE ports, you could get POE that way.