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25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

michael.stapelberg.ch

61–70 of 359 posts

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#61
post #25
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only rub with that is - shouldn't the router be only a router from a security perspective? Definitely combining servers for home use does make sense though.

Ideally yes. But with the resources needed for 25 Gbps, not using one machine for multiple purposes seems wasteful. The server only stores publically available data, though, so not a big deal from a security perspective.

What do you mean by resources required? expansion ports on the mb?

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#62
post #47
post #4

I'm always amazed by people who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7. In this case replacing a typical router (which consumes like a lightbulb), with a full-fledged PC (probably consuming like x100 the power). I guess some people around the world have quite cheap utility bills! For me, it's either a Raspberry Pi type of power consumption, or else a server that only…

I do remember a "smart NIC" making its rounds in the news a few years ago -- although "few" in this case might be >10. It was essentially a low-power machine in itself (with no Raspberry Pis in sight yet) that could finish an HTTP download or receive e-mails without waking up the host computer. But that's more high-level than the buffering/relaying of packets you are thinking of. Edit: a bit weird, I wrote a very sim…

asus "killer nic", almost pure marketing wankery with little benefit https://www.pcgamer.com/motherboards-with-killer-network-ada...

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#63
post #4

I'm always amazed by people who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7. In this case replacing a typical router (which consumes like a lightbulb), with a full-fledged PC (probably consuming like x100 the power). I guess some people around the world have quite cheap utility bills! For me, it's either a Raspberry Pi type of power consumption, or else a server that only…

> who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7.

Maybe they need it? A router isn't a home server. But even if, why do you keep your power efficient router running 24/7? You could turn it off when you're not home to save even more energy.

> a full-fledged PC (probably consuming like x100 the power

Maybe do some research before claims like these. He states this pc idles at 48W. Please show me a router capable of handling 25gbit/s that consumes 0,5W at idle.

> how would you build a "something" that monitors the network for packets sent to powered-off machines, then somehow caches the request, powers the destination machine On, and finally lets the request continue to its target?

That's what "wake on LAN" is for.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#64
post #4

I'm always amazed by people who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7. In this case replacing a typical router (which consumes like a lightbulb), with a full-fledged PC (probably consuming like x100 the power). I guess some people around the world have quite cheap utility bills! For me, it's either a Raspberry Pi type of power consumption, or else a server that only…

Have you measured how much electricity a computer doing routing consumes? I bet it's a lot less than you think.

Also measure how much a good, high-bandwidth router uses. I bet that is a lot more than you think.

the "why do this" question for me comes about entirely because of the continual manual intervention that is needed for solutions like this. just not worth it, to me.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine ANY reason that a private household would actually need a 10G or 25G connection unless it's doubling as a workplace and they're hosting servers. Even that seems like a temporary stop-gap situation, get some rackspace in a datacenter already! Maybe they're not selling enough 25G to their business customers and they're trying to get private users onto 25G?

I can see that. Certainly if they already have the infrastructure deployed then a residential usage pattern on 10G is going to look identical to that on 1G (and I’d wager identical to that on 100M in most cases). In which case they can get more recurring revenue for likely only an increased one-off cost.

When I clicked through to the provider it looked like the only difference between 1/10/25G was the setup cost. But I might have mis-read.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#66
post #23

What is the practical consumer (or even SME) use of a 10 or 25G connection? As a consumer I’d definitely get it for the fun of it, but what is the point in reality? We’ve just launched an ISP a couple of weeks ago here in Europe. Peak bandwidth use is about 3mbps per customer, and customers will download the same amount of data regardless of their plan. I acknowledge this could be lack of imagination on my part, but…

> What is the practical consumer (or even SME) use of a 10 or 25G connection? Remote file storage, leasing servers for things like icecream, or basic HPC, self-hosting for a small business, even a small DC can run off it.

is this the icecream you speak of? https://github.com/icecc/icecream I've never heard of it so I was intrigued.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#67
post #4

I'm always amazed by people who don't bat an eye on the perspective of having a home server, sucking up electricity 24/7. In this case replacing a typical router (which consumes like a lightbulb), with a full-fledged PC (probably consuming like x100 the power). I guess some people around the world have quite cheap utility bills! For me, it's either a Raspberry Pi type of power consumption, or else a server that only…

Maybe they have money and they find that spending money on homelabbing is worth the effort. And really it isn't THAT expensive either. I for one don't bat an eye on my USD200 yearly homelab electricity cost.

Of course if one wishes to perfectly optimize everything then having a homelab might well wasteful.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#68
If anyone is interested in building 10Gb router on a budget you can buy Mellanox OCP NIC with an adapter from OCP to PCIe for around 5~30 USD ( depend on your location )[0]. I recently build one 10G router with 4x10Gb, 2x1Gb ports for around 200 USD using second hand PC.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkf3PkuKdOA

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#69
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of light bulb? :) A typical consumer router will take up something like 5-10 watts. A PC will suck in 20-50. Remember that the PC will be a lot more powerful so it’ll spend most of its time with low CPU usage. Say the worst case scenario: 45W difference. 45W * (24 * 30) / 1000 = 32.4 kW*h/month. At $0.10 kWh rate that’s $3.24/month, less than a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Oh my I wish those $0.10 kWh... in here we have 3 prices through the day (depends on what time it is), and the cheapest one is already higher than that :) Anyway I did the math and it would be $7/month. More than double your estimation, but still not horrendous. Although for that range of prices one might be able to find a managed instance machine in some cloud provider... (edit: somewhere in the process I lost track…

The real difference is in latency: I tend to use the same operator on the fixed and mobile line, with Wireguard. SSH, SMB and Matrix respond almost as if you were in LAN.

If I add the cost for bandwidth and storage of a data center, then the economic choice is obvious.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#70
post #28

What is the practical consumer (or even SME) use of a 10 or 25G connection? As a consumer I’d definitely get it for the fun of it, but what is the point in reality? We’ve just launched an ISP a couple of weeks ago here in Europe. Peak bandwidth use is about 3mbps per customer, and customers will download the same amount of data regardless of their plan. I acknowledge this could be lack of imagination on my part, but…

Internally: Every once in a while, I move VM images between machines. Even at 1Gbps, it's a drag to sit there and watch them transfer. Not really a big deal, but it'd be nice to see them move faster. Externally: I back up my Google Drive periodically. 500GB takes a while to transfer.

> I back up my Google Drive periodically. 500GB takes a while to transfer.

Do you download the whole thing each time, vs just changed files?

Either way, (scheduled!) periodic backups sounds like a thing that could happen over trough (well, while you're sleeping), in which case a 200Mbps connection would be more than adequate for your use case (~5.6 hours for 500GB).

The numbers obviously scale linearly with the size of your download (a common anecdote I hear re: people filling up TBs of hard drives is via lots of RAW photos), so in that scenario, you'd need to transfer 30-40TB overnight (8 hours) in order to saturate a 10G uplink; you'd likely saturate hard drive write speeds first, not to mention you'd need multiple HDDs/SSDs connected to even store that much data in the first place.

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