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25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#71

Post by smolder »

great-potential wrote: post #9
j1elo wrote: 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 think if the OP uses this only as a router it is indeed a waste of power. What I would probably do is also use it as nas/workstation by using virtualization, SR-IOV is now pretty standard on these cards.

Yeah, I have an overpowered router PC (mostly in the capabilites sense --its a low power passively-coolable Xeon), but it also acts as a flash NAS, and hosts a few other containerized services that I prefer are always-on, it's a wireguard endpoint, etc. I've got a separate sometimes-on box for other VMs and containers. That one hosts a windows VM with a VFIO-attached GPU which my living room tv plugs into. Altogether it's lots of computing power for home use but draws relatively little at the wall. I'm pretty happy where I landed in terms of overall utility versus TCO, using this sort of consolidated-hardware approach.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#72

Post by yakubin »

adamcharnock wrote: post #17

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…

I work from home and regularly need to download large files from work servers. Several months ago I noticed that my internal network was 100Mb/s, which was dreadful. Downloads of 500MiB files would take tens of minutes, because Tomcat would drop connections on such a slow download. And even without dropped connections it generally took a long time to download anything, and Zoom call quality was regularly degraded (I sometimes heard my colleagues as androids and vice versa). I fixed the issue and now I get the full 700M/s that my ISP offers (and 1G/s internally over a Netgear switch for NFS transfers). I could get a 1G/s, but it would cost me more and 700M/s is fine for the most time. But sometimes to get a shorter feedback loop on what I'm doing I could imagine getting a 5G/s. I think it would be optimal. But 10G is clearly overkill.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#73

Post by rand846633 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #44
adamcharnock wrote: post #17

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…

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?

Init7,OP’s isp is a non profit

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#74

Post by rzzzt »

rasz wrote: post #62
rzzzt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"Application offloading" was one of the terms I tried when searching for it, and got this as a result - not the same thing, but similar: https://www.academia.edu/10225597/Putting_it_on_the_NIC_A_ca...

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#75

Post by iforgotpassword »

mixermachine wrote: post #27
IgorPartola wrote: post #10

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.

Add HDDs and 10 GBit/s hardware and you surely reach 60 watts or more idling. Many home labs also don't use the newest hardware but old server hardware (add 10 - 40 watt idle). A NUC or other Laptop hardware on the other hand would be OK to run. Maybe SSD raids are (financially) feasible for everyday files in the near future. You are lucky to pay only $0.10. Here (Germany) I pay 0.30 Euro per kW/h. About $0.36 dollar…

> Many home labs also don't use the newest hardware but old server hardware (add 10 - 40 watt idle).

Yes, but switching to newer, more efficient hardware is not free, so you need to factor this in when considering a switch. Also, in case you don't only care about your wallet but also environmental impact it's getting even more complicated, since manufacturing your new shiny toy definitely is polluting the environment somewhere in Asia, gets shipped via ship burning horribly dirty fuel in international waters etc.

If you don't have any use for the old hardware, chances are it will end up burning on some open field somewhere in Africa after local recyclers already extracted the good stuff...

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#76

Post by zamadatix »

sliken wrote: post #8

Was hoping for similar but 10 gbit. Anyone know a nice small/quiet linux box with 2x10 gbit for use as a router? I have a 8 port x 1gbit ubiquiti router, but ubiquiti seems to be going downhill, and 8 port x 10gbit routers are pretty expensive. My plan was a 2 port router and use vlan tagging to a 8+ port 10g switch. That way I can have separate networks for trusted ethernet, trusted wifi, untrusted ethernet, and unt…

Look for an old but not outdated enterprise switch and grab a refurb. Most very large enterprises redo the network on roughly a 7 year cycle and in 2014 10g uplinks with tons of 1g devices was very standard. E.g. for less than 100$ you can usually pick up an ers 4826gts on ebay which has 24 ports of 10/100/1000 copper with POE+ capability and 2 1/10G SFP+ ports. It has hardware switching and routing which will perform better than software, particularly on latency.

As far as noise 1u devices are usually a bit whiney even when not pushing much air but that's usually fixed with 1 or 2 200mm PC fans.

You'll still likely need something with NAT, preferably hardware NAT, for the actual internet handoff. Some of this class enterprise device have NAT support (not the 4826) but that'll usually be in CPU and perform not that great especially if you have like a gig connection. Or if you want to go pure software here any cheap mini PC with 2 gigabit Ethernet ports should be able to handle NAT reasonably for gig internet or less since it doesn't also have to do the 10g internal route/switch on top.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#77

Post by [deleted] »

t0mas88 wrote: post #50
manbash wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now it's up to the person to decide whether increase in living cost is worth it, which... is kinda normal. I think I spend more money on other things that I take enjoyment from.

Sure, it's just that many people don't think about this impact because 50W sounds low.

[deleted]

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#78

Post by iforgotpassword »

melling wrote: post #21
j1elo wrote: 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…

He claims one of his goals is to be power efficient “The PC consumes about 48W of power when idle (only management …” https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 “ How much electricity does an American home use? In 2019, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,649 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of about 877 kWh per month”

Ok so what am I missing here? In Germany a typical four person household is 2000kwh a year. Surely air conditioning can't make up for such a difference? Everybody already switched to electric cars?

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#79

Post by tyingq »

j1elo wrote: 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…

His starting requirements include one pci card for 25gb and another for 4 port 10gb. I don't think there's any low power way to do that. Any motherboard with enough slots, CPU power, and PCI lanes to handle all that aggregate bandwidth isn't going to be low power setup. If you underpowered it, then you might as well back off of 25gb/10gb.

So it's not really a home server. It just happens to be in a home.

Re: 25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build

#80

Post by r1ch »

secure wrote: post #24
r1ch wrote: post #20

One thing I've run into when building my own 10gbps router that I didn't see mentioned - you probably need to disable power saving / frequency scaling. The handling of packets is done in software, so when you start a download and the flood of initial data comes in at 10gbps, your CPU will still be running at 600 MHz and unable to keep up. It ramps up within 5-50 milliseconds depending on CPU, but for a TCP download t…

In none of my tests did I need to change power saving settings. My iperf3 transfers stayed at 10 Gbps throughout.

You need to check your dropped packet statistics to know for sure. iperf3 TCP over LAN will not see throughput affected by a few dropped packets, a stream 100ms away may take longer to recover. High bandwidth UDP testing with iperf3 should also expose this, the first measurement will usually see dropped packets.
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