YouTube can be problematic. It lead me down a homelab rabbit hole. I already had some networking and a mesh wifi setup, but this was different. This was running services inside of your house with relatively inexpensive equipment. So, I jumped in.
I started out with a Raspberry Pi 3 kit. I loaded it up with Raspbian and installed Home Assistant, Homebridge (for the pesky NestxYale lock I have) and maybe Pi-Hole. That lead to me thinking, “If I’m running my DNS through this Pi-Hole, I should have redundancy so if it goes down, I don’t want to bring the whole house offline.” I would need another low power server to run redundant apps on.
I started looking and saw Zimaboards, a Chinese x86 with more horsepower and RAM than the Pi. I picked up two of those with the intention of having one hold apps and the other would be my replacement router for the house. The 4GB version would run apps using there CasaOS (a web interface for Docker), and the 8GB would run OPNSense for my router. Zimaboards had two network ports, so the router config was simple (until it wasn’t).
Everything was going fine, but I noticed I wasn’t getting all the speed out of my ISP with the Zimaboard router. Some research pointed to the onboard network chip and OPNSense drivers. So, I bought an add-on card that would hang out the PCI-E slot on the board. I upped the speed for the internal LAN to 2.5Gb/s. My ISP connection was 1 Gb/s, but if you only run a 1Gb LAN connection, protocol overhead will have you in the 750Mb/s if you’re lucky. Running 2.5Gb/s on the WAN port gets me a consistent 1.11 Gb/s. Problem solved, or was it?
I’ll continue this in the next part.
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