this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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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!

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[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

What scenerio would require multiple Ethernet ports? Is two or even one sufficient for what I want to do?

[–] Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Backup internet, eg two ISPs supplying internet to your house.

Two (or more) seperate networks that need access to the same server. This is done so is network A is down, network B can still access the server.

I still don't fully understand your question. You NEED at least one rj45 to supply network access to the server. (I'm ignoring the fact that wifi exists)

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't know you could have to ISPs connected to one device. I won't be requiring that however. I was wondering if besides the one port to connect my server to the router there was anything else I was missing or is commonly used that I should be aware of to take up another port.

[–] Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Well they would be going to the router and the router would be handling it, but you could still have seperate feeds from the router on lan/opt ports to the device.dont think they will both function at the same time though, system needs priorities

[–] MajinBlayze@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Are you confusing "ports" with "interfaces"? I can see that happening since we do colloquially refer to both as ports depending on context.

Each service will bind to it's own "port" which is tied up by that service. However each interface (the external physical connection) supports like 65,000 software ports.

So in practice, no, you don't usually need more than one physical network connection to run multiple services.

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch 1 points 1 year ago

I didn't know that you could have two "interfaces" vs "ports". I was talking about the physical ports knowing this. This helps me understand what @fiivemacs means. I'm definitely not going to be using more than one provider. Thank you!

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have two ports bonded on my server to get more speed, but I could get by with a single port just fine.
If you need to connect to multiple networks you can use VLANs and a single ethernet port if you want to.

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is port bonding exactly? Extra throughput by using two ports from the same ISP?

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bonding is using multiple ports for increased throughput or redundancy. I have my server set to balance-alb which will share the load over both ports when transferring data between two or more computers. It will not increase the throughput to a single computer though.

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you. I don't think I have a good need for this feature so that'll save me a port.

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