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I want to beef up my home network backend.
About three months ago my wife gave me the go ahead to cut the cable and we use a freenas box to serve up local HD content, as well as stream a lot of video from the internet, to 4 XBMC boxes in the house.
I have killed quite a bit of equipment. I had a trendnet switch burn out, determined that my WHS box had bad RAM, and yesterday I killed my mini-itx DD-WRT router. Granted a lot of the equipment had some miles on them so it can be expected to nuke some of it based on the always on nature and always in use.
Our useage is that we have at any given point two devices streaming media at any given time. I also have a virtual server setup with at least two images running at any time with an active RDP connection from me. I have several databased running that use network as well. My wife is on the internet all the time with her iPhone and her laptop. She posts photos for clients and such. I play on xbox live when time permits. I typically have a VPN connection to the corp office about half the time as well. I also have night WHS backups taking place. I work from home about half the week and issues that drop me from the VPN are not acceptable if I plan to continue working from home.
I am looking for advice on a new setup at home to keep everything well-oiled. Before the router died yesterday most of the time, 95%, everything was smooth. Since replacing the hardware for the x86 DD-WRT router yesterday the network has stuttered several times, shows will stop stream, VPN will drop, internet goes down. Once this happens it usually hiccups for 30 seconds or so and doesn't seem to stop until I reboot DD-WRT. Then things settle down for quite a while.
My setup at home is a patch panel in the garage with 8 drops throughout the house. I have the house wired with Cat5e and everything runs fine at gigabit speeds. I had a Via EPIA mini-itx C800 board with 128MB of RAM running DD-WRT for the router with a PCI Intel NIC for the LAN port. That fed in to a TrendNet Green 8 port gigabit switch that fed in to the patch panel that ran to the rest of the house. The replacement DD-WRT router, for now, is an old HP 2GHz machine with 512MB of RAM. I replaced the bad TrendNet switch about 6 weeks ago with another of the same model. Part of the problem I am sure is the winters and summers in the garage are not easy on the equipment. This past week the temp in the garage got to around 24 degrees F. In the summer it can get up to 115 degrees F or more.
About 4 weeks ago my WHS decided to die on me so I replaced it with new hardware and use Freenas as the OS. This also allowed me to virtualize several other machines on to the new hardware.
I want to redo the network with better gear that can handle my setup without hiccuping. I have looked at build my own super router again using DD-WRT on an Intel Atom board with dual onboard Intel Gigabit Nics and feeding that in to the same TrendNet switch or even an upgraded switch. That option will likely run me $370 plus a new switch. But that allows me to continue to use DD-WRT with I know and like. Another option has been a RouterBoard 1100AH. It has 13 Gigabit ports built in to the unit plus it is its router, switch and router in one unit. It runs routerOS however and I don't know it. I played with the online demo last night it was not too bad but it isn't my DD-WRT... I could figure it out if need be. This option appears to be around $400.
tl,dr
My home setup consists of a router with DHCP and some port forwarding along with a ton of internal traffic. What would be a setup to make sure this setup has a 99%, or as close to that as possible, uptime, for around $400.
About three months ago my wife gave me the go ahead to cut the cable and we use a freenas box to serve up local HD content, as well as stream a lot of video from the internet, to 4 XBMC boxes in the house.
I have killed quite a bit of equipment. I had a trendnet switch burn out, determined that my WHS box had bad RAM, and yesterday I killed my mini-itx DD-WRT router. Granted a lot of the equipment had some miles on them so it can be expected to nuke some of it based on the always on nature and always in use.
Our useage is that we have at any given point two devices streaming media at any given time. I also have a virtual server setup with at least two images running at any time with an active RDP connection from me. I have several databased running that use network as well. My wife is on the internet all the time with her iPhone and her laptop. She posts photos for clients and such. I play on xbox live when time permits. I typically have a VPN connection to the corp office about half the time as well. I also have night WHS backups taking place. I work from home about half the week and issues that drop me from the VPN are not acceptable if I plan to continue working from home.
I am looking for advice on a new setup at home to keep everything well-oiled. Before the router died yesterday most of the time, 95%, everything was smooth. Since replacing the hardware for the x86 DD-WRT router yesterday the network has stuttered several times, shows will stop stream, VPN will drop, internet goes down. Once this happens it usually hiccups for 30 seconds or so and doesn't seem to stop until I reboot DD-WRT. Then things settle down for quite a while.
My setup at home is a patch panel in the garage with 8 drops throughout the house. I have the house wired with Cat5e and everything runs fine at gigabit speeds. I had a Via EPIA mini-itx C800 board with 128MB of RAM running DD-WRT for the router with a PCI Intel NIC for the LAN port. That fed in to a TrendNet Green 8 port gigabit switch that fed in to the patch panel that ran to the rest of the house. The replacement DD-WRT router, for now, is an old HP 2GHz machine with 512MB of RAM. I replaced the bad TrendNet switch about 6 weeks ago with another of the same model. Part of the problem I am sure is the winters and summers in the garage are not easy on the equipment. This past week the temp in the garage got to around 24 degrees F. In the summer it can get up to 115 degrees F or more.
About 4 weeks ago my WHS decided to die on me so I replaced it with new hardware and use Freenas as the OS. This also allowed me to virtualize several other machines on to the new hardware.
I want to redo the network with better gear that can handle my setup without hiccuping. I have looked at build my own super router again using DD-WRT on an Intel Atom board with dual onboard Intel Gigabit Nics and feeding that in to the same TrendNet switch or even an upgraded switch. That option will likely run me $370 plus a new switch. But that allows me to continue to use DD-WRT with I know and like. Another option has been a RouterBoard 1100AH. It has 13 Gigabit ports built in to the unit plus it is its router, switch and router in one unit. It runs routerOS however and I don't know it. I played with the online demo last night it was not too bad but it isn't my DD-WRT... I could figure it out if need be. This option appears to be around $400.
tl,dr
My home setup consists of a router with DHCP and some port forwarding along with a ton of internal traffic. What would be a setup to make sure this setup has a 99%, or as close to that as possible, uptime, for around $400.