I just bought a 1000ft spool of truecable Cat6a SSTP when the price dropped on amazon and did my entire house with that. Worked great and was pretty straightforward (other than the rando spacetime twist between the basement and the ground floor), especially if you have the tools and a fluke.
The box had an actual laptop (exactly as described) - had an at-the-install-screen copy of win11. Though once I got it up and running, some setting appeared to be controlled by an administrator/group policy. Maybe it.is my total lack of familiarity with windows 11. Either way, will probably...
Pulled the trigger on a used (excellent condition) gram 17. 13th Gen i7, 32gb ram, 1tb SSD for less than 40% of retail. Seller had thousands of reviews and free shipping to APOs, so fingers crossed it's not a big box of dick-shaped glitter or hasn't been used as a cricket bat.
I have a different use case than you, no need to game and mainly spreadsheet and coding, but I have been scoping out the LG gram 17. Looks like you can get 12th Gen versions very cheaply these days (not much of a bump in 13th Gen anyway).
Sorry for the necro, but did you ever get an XPS17? My XPS13 (7th gen) is getting really long in the tooth -- can't even take windows 11, apparently. The only reason I keep it around is to take proctored exams which can't run on linux, but good god, trying to take a 4hr exam on a 13" screen...
TAK is the architecture, the network in your use case would be commercial of course ;). Setting up your own certificates to build your "team" is pretty straightforward, particularly if you have an accessible surface on your home stack, but I guess you could spin up an AWS instance as well for...
If you are trying to do it on the cheap and have LoS, you can always build a directional waveguide antenna out of spare parts / the appropriately sized metal food tin.
Edit: saw this is for your fiancee's father. High street cred risk reward with a future family member. I would build one in...
questioning the need to upgrade the barebones I currently have (5600G, mitx AM4 mobo, 32gb ddr4 --> 7900, mitx AM5 mobo, 64gb ddr5)... but you know how the upgrade bug goes, hah.
Supermicro X10SDV-6C+-TLN4F (Xeon D-1528 w/ dual 10GbE) w/ 32GB ECC, 256gb nvme ssd, and a titanium psu in a 1U rack.
Bulletproof and way overkill for the packages / services I am running, but I got an absurd deal on the main board and had most of the rest laying around. Also fits nicely into...
Not relying upon dated firmware for your network security, being able to select your own modem (if your isp let's you do this), etc.
If you are doing more on your network than just blasting all traffic to your isp and their DNS, you likely already have hardware capable of doing the routing as well.
There are occasionally good post-holiday sales on higher end equipment. I picked up a pair of Netgear WAX218's for $100 after Thanksgiving a couple years ago when I decided to shift away from ubiquiti.
TBH, if the reasons were truly nefarious, you don't rent a VPN, you just pivot through some poor schmuck's legacy provider router and unpatched windows box.
pretty sure my mobo can stomp that ivy bridge xeon all day long, but appreciate the linkage.
Other than "hook it up and see what happens", anyone got any real world experience with the cpu requirements for load-balancing... from what I've seen in the thread so far: not a very big impact on cpu...
I don't have WAN right now, that's why I was asking the question -- looking at a 300mbit (allegedly) vdsl+LTE offering and whatever starlink can get to me (Ookla was seeing a 120mpbs average in Q1). Generally, I am pretty sure this can handle these speeds, but want it to be good enough to deal...
Sorry about that, I should have included the current specs.
I am rocking a Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F (Xeon D-1541, Broadwell chip) in the edge device.
As far as services, I run pfblockerNG with DPI/local cert and have been dabbling in suricata.
Anyone doing dual-WAN on a pfsense box? I am wondering what kind of CPU power is required for load balancing two decently high speed connections (1gbps and 300mbps) and would love to hear your tales to know if I'm barking up the wrong tree with my current pfsense box.
Thanks in advance!