Network Question

[crowdx42]

Hi all,

 so I am wondering what everyone is using for their NIC on unRAID and how many are using 10 gigabit connections?
 I currently only have a single 1 gigabit NIC on my unRAID servers and I am wondering what impact adding a 4 port gigabit NIC to my setup would have. If I wanted my main computer to connect at higher than 1 gigabit would I need to also add a 4 port NIC and then a managed switch to bond the NIC connections? i.e. 4 network cables from each box with a managed switch in the middle? Is there any other way to do this?
I am seeing some managed switches online for $200 or less now.

Thoughts? Will this work? Will I see any impact to connecting to the unRAID server?

[ashman70]

What makes you want to connect at faster speeds than 1GB? Sure you can bond two network ports together, but what is your goal? What is it about 1GB network speeds that makes you think its not fast enough?

[JorgeB]

Note that bonding won't currently improve single transfer speed between unRAID and Windows clients, you'll need 10GbE.

There are cheap 10GbE NICs available on ebay, e.g., Mellanox Connectx-2, that allow you to connect to computers without a switch for under 100$ (as long as they are fairly close to each other).

[crowdx42]

I have two goals. First is to increase the bandwidth on my server for when it is copying files across to my backup server while streaming movies or other bandwidth intensive operations. Something that maybe impacting my network also is that I have a dedicated PC running Blue Iris DVR software monitoring 14 network cameras. When I look at the bandwidth monitor on my Asus router it shows it does use a lot of bandwidth but I am not sure how that impacts the overall bandwidth, just thought it was worth the mention.

 

My secondary goal is to speed up file copies to the server, it has 2 1tb Samsung Evo SSDs in RAID 1 and so it would be nice to benefit from their extra speed on file copies

Unfortunately my PC and server are just a little too far from each other to use the direct SFP.

 

Maybe I am incorrect in my assumptions but I believe currently with my 1 gigabit single NIC in my server, if I direct copy between it and the backup server with no parity drive (I am doing a full large sync and so I disabled the parity drive until that is complete) it will saturate the 1 gig NIC and cause possible buffering issues when watching streaming content and also possibly make the GUI unresponsive during this process also.

Thoughts?

[ashman70]

So are you anticipating issues, or are you actually having issues? I would first see if 1GB is more than enough for you, its difficult to know unless you actually do some network monitoring to really know just how much of traffic you have on your network. The are also other factors at play here such as the type of network cables you have, the model of switches you have etc. I have a gig network in my home with Cat5e cabling, Cisco and HP switches, I've done regular file transfer of 100's of GB in size and never had it cause a problem. You can certainly go to 10GB but I am not sure if you would see a difference except maybe in file copy speed. Are you doing anything over wifi or is this all hard wired?

[crowdx42]

So, yes, I have had cases where my server has been copying files and while watching tv I get buffering message on Kodi.
My network is using all 1 gigabit switches with an Asus RT-AC68U router. Would the dvr and network cameras affect the router? i.e. with 14 network cameras streaming and then add in a large file copy plus streaming on the tv, could it be the Router?

All my cables are Cat 5e or Cat 6, everything is hard wired except for the wireless on the router which I only use for mobile devices.

In your setup ashman70, are you running a single nic on the server? Your switches/router seem more business grade than what I am using, are they managed switches?

[ashman70]

Yes I am using single nic's in my servers, my switches may be have more ports be managed and have more bandwidth but I am not sure that would make too much of a difference. I don't tend to do large file transfers at the same time that I want to stream something but that being said stuff is usually being copied around on my network at all times, although it is not 100's of GB. When you get buffering messages in Kodi is that when you are streaming something local on your network like a file off one of your servers or streaming over the internet? What models are your switches?

[crowdx42]

So I have attached a snapshot from the Asus Router of the current network traffic, this is really only the traffic from the network cameras as no other activity is happening at present.

 

[ashman70]

So what is plugged into your Asus router? What model is your Asus router?

[crowdx42]

The ASUS Router is RT-AC68U . I have a netgear GS108 switch plugged into it and from there, there are several other switches throughout my house, some of which are POE to power the network cameras. The POE are TP Link TL-SF1008P (3 in total, all being used solely for my network cameras). The other switches are all using netgear GS108s which are all gigabit switches and I believe should not be affected by any 100mbit switches on the network. In an ideal world, I would like the ip cams all on their own network but I am not sure on how to do this without dedicated cabling from the cams to a dedicated switch. Would a virtual network achieve the same thing?

I also have considered adding a managed switch instead of the Asus router and only use the router for wifi access.

[ashman70]

You'd have to draw me a picture, but I am going to try and guess how things are physically connected.

 

So you have three TP Link PoE switches with cameras hard wired into them. Do all three have a single cable run back to the GS108 or are they connected to each other and then one connects back to the GS108? Is it not possible dues to distance or cables to do individual cable runs from each camera back to the GS108 thereby eliminating the TP Link switches? I then assume your Asus router is connected to your GS108? I also guess you have some sort of media player or PC that connects to the GS108 as well?

[crowdx42]

So in essence yes.The ip cams cannot be directly routed back to the single switch due to needing power from the POE switches. Also one set of cameras do share a cat6 run which also is used for a NUC which allows streaming in the main living room (we only stream from the NUC as it is only my wife and I).

GS108 is an 8 port switch, so even if I could get all the ip cams back to the same spot it would need a much larger switch, at least a 24 port.

With the physical cabling being capable of handling way more than 1 gigabit in bandwidth I would think that the single cable runs from the most distant areas in the house should not be an issue (longest run is around 75ft.

I suppose the simplest way to visualize my setup would be to say that each room with network access has a single GS108 and from there, both the POE switches and servers are routed through the GS108s. The only place that I have 2 GS108s is the main office which has a switch for the main set of computers and then the second switch which handles the rest of the house network. Both GS108s in the office are plugged directly into the Asus router.

[ashman70]

I think what you need is a single large switch for your 'core' having so many small switches all over the house and then small switches at your core isn't helping things. I am not saying for sure this is your problem but IMO it is a problem with the way things are architected.

 

My network has a few small switches around the house but they are connected to drops that come back to my core switch which is a Cisco 24+2 managed gigabit switch.

 

In your case you have several small switches coming back to small switches that may be struggling with the amount of traffic they are dealing with. I would suggest you consider replacing the two GS108's with a single 24 port switch which would become your 'core' switch. It would be able to handle all the traffic your other TP Links switches bring back to it. I am also personally not a fan of Netgear or TP Link, I've had bad experiences with Netgear switches flaking out on me and TP Link just seem cheap although I have read they've improved their quality. I tend to stick to Cisco or used HP procurve switches which tend to be old but they just work and never die, you can get some good deals on eBay too.

[Harro]

23 minutes ago, crowdx42 said:

So in essence yes.The ip cams cannot be directly routed back to the single switch due to needing power from the POE switches. Also one set of cameras do share a cat6 run which also is used for a NUC which allows streaming in the main living room (we only stream from the NUC as it is only my wife and I).

GS108 is an 8 port switch, so even if I could get all the ip cams back to the same spot it would need a much larger switch, at least a 24 port.

With the physical cabling being capable of handling way more than 1 gigabit in bandwidth I would think that the single cable runs from the most distant areas in the house should not be an issue (longest run is around 75ft.

I suppose the simplest way to visualize my setup would be to say that each room with network access has a single GS108 and from there, both the POE switches and servers are routed through the GS108s. The only place that I have 2 GS108s is the main office which has a switch for the main set of computers and then the second switch which handles the rest of the house network. Both GS108s in the office are plugged directly into the Asus router.

 

I run 16 IP cameras and have them wired with these switches TRENDnet TPE-TG81g. These in turn are fed into a dvr. The dvr is fed into the router. Besides the dvr into router I also have other switches fed into router to expand my network to other areas of house/office.  I have no problem with buffering issues on my NUC while watching a movie from my server.

 

All cameras can be seen on the local  network and or can be seen outside of the network, ie , iphone, tablet or remote computer..

[ashman70]

Every network is different, there are many factors that can make or break things and it's difficult to make comparisons.

[crowdx42]

Harro, I believe the big difference in your setup is that the DVR would be managing the ip cams and only the feed from the DVR is hitting the switch, basically you have what I was thinking about, the ip cams are on their dedicated network. In my situation my ip cams are on the main network, as is the PC which is acting as a DVR, so all the routing is still being handled by the Asus router.

[crowdx42]

32 minutes ago, ashman70 said:

I think what you need is a single large switch for your 'core' having so many small switches all over the house and then small switches at your core isn't helping things. I am not saying for sure this is your problem but IMO it is a problem with the way things are architected.

 

My network has a few small switches around the house but they are connected to drops that come back to my core switch which is a Cisco 24+2 managed gigabit switch.

 

In your case you have several small switches coming back to small switches that may be struggling with the amount of traffic they are dealing with. I would suggest you consider replacing the two GS108's with a single 24 port switch which would become your 'core' switch. It would be able to handle all the traffic your other TP Links switches bring back to it. I am also personally not a fan of Netgear or TP Link, I've had bad experiences with Netgear switches flaking out on me and TP Link just seem cheap although I have read they've improved their quality. I tend to stick to Cisco or used HP procurve switches which tend to be old but they just work and never die, you can get some good deals on eBay too.

Yes, I think a larger dedicated switch may help, I presume I should go managed? Thus making the Asus just an wifi access point?
With a managed switch I could also create a virtual network and assign all the ip cams to that network and the PC that works as a dvr and from there have that single PC connecting to the main network, all via routing through the switch?

[Harro]

19 minutes ago, crowdx42 said:

Harro, I believe the big difference in your setup is that the DVR would be managing the ip cams and only the feed from the DVR is hitting the switch, basically you have what I was thinking about, the ip cams are on their dedicated network. In my situation my ip cams are on the main network, as is the PC which is acting as a DVR, so all the routing is still being handled by the Asus router.

Yes I was going to say that in my initial post. The dvr is indeed managing it's own network, so traffic from I cameras don't interfere with normal lan connections. You may want to look into switching on of your computers to acting as a dvr. The dvr server ip has a loopback of 127.0.0.0 with a network ip of the 192.168.xxx.xxx. I forward it's internal ip to router for outside access. All traffic is then handled by dvr without flooding of the local network.

 

I have recording on a 2 week cycle, overwriting old data. From the recordings I can then use my unraid server to store additional over flow recordings if needed.

Edited April 10, 2017 by Harro

[ashman70]

15 minutes ago, crowdx42 said:

Yes, I think a larger dedicated switch may help, I presume I should go managed? Thus making the Asus just an wifi access point?
With a managed switch I could also create a virtual network and assign all the ip cams to that network and the PC that works as a dvr and from there have that single PC connecting to the main network, all via routing through the switch?

 

Managed is nice, it allows you to bond ports together and see what is going on on the switch and create VLANS, its a nice to have not necessarily a need to have, that's up to you. I am not sure you would need to create VLANS for your cameras but you could. Your ASUS router would continue to act as a wireless router and gateway for your network.

[crowdx42]

My issue with dedicated hardware is that 3 of my rear cameras are sharing a network cable that is also used for streaming. I really think the cabling is fine but the routing would be  adding additional traffic to a Router which I do not believe was built to take such a 24/7 load.

[crowdx42]

1 minute ago, ashman70 said:

 

Managed is nice, it allows you to bond ports together and see what is going on on the switch and create VLANS, its a nice to have not necessarily a need to have, that's up to you. I am not sure you would need to create VLANS for your cameras but you could. Your ASUS router would continue to act as a wireless router and gateway for your network.

Agree, I think I might go with managed just to allow more flexibility and bonding would allow me to hook 4 network cables out of my main pc and link those back to 4 ports on the switch and then 4 ports to the unRAID box which could theoretically increase the upload/download between those machines? Correct?

[ashman70]

I don't know that bonding int he way you describe it would necessarily increase throughput performance, in my experience the gain in speed is negligible.

[crowdx42]

So I am looking at the switch below. I am hoping 24 ports will be fine. Will this switch have any issue with having 10/100 switches connected to it? (The TP Link POE switches).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GHMU5G

[ashman70]

That is one of the switches I have, great switch, great price, you won't be disappointed with it.

[crowdx42]

I ended up going with that switch and I threw in this 4 Port NIC, hopefully it plays well with unRAID. I also ordered some additional Cat 6a patch cables to hook it all up from Monoprice   

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=Intel+PRO%2F1000+VT+Quad+Port+Server+Adapter+LP+PCI-E+EXPI9404VT