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!

For what it’s worth, I have a server with two rj45s (and a third for BMC), but I only plugged one of them into my switch. I run anywhere from 2-8 containers/vms on that server and never felt the need to hook up the other jack. I guess there’s probably some contention of running multiple hosts all through that one connection, but typically I don’t really need anything faster than the ~2-400mbps I get with WiFi anyway. So to answer you question, it depends, but I would generally say maybe start with the one and don’t worry about it unless you’re really moving massive amounts of data regularly and saturating your line. You’d also need to consider you’ll need a switch and other network hardware capable of handling that throughout as well if you’re really going to potentially saturate those ports.

@sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch
creator
link
fedilink
English
11Y

Thank you. This gives a lot of context and makes sense. I think I’ll use the second port for an ePOE hub for the cameras and the pcie slot for the Coral. Right now I use a half decent all-in-one router with OpenWRT but have been wanting to upgrade to get AX WiFi. I’ll look into makinging sure I get competent hardware.

Create a post

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

  • 1 user online
  • 126 users / day
  • 421 users / week
  • 1.16K users / month
  • 3.85K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.68K Posts
  • 74.2K Comments
  • Modlog