Tag Archives: network

The 10GbE, all-fibre home network rabbit hole

My paltry AliExpress-special 8-port 2.5G switch

When I moved out of home in 2015, I needed my own home networking equipment. And unfortunately, moving back to ADSL2+ from FTTP NBN was every bit as awful as it sounds. I absolutely don’t remember why I ended up choosing the venerable Asus DSL-AC68U for my all-in-one home wireless modem and router, so I won’t pretend to, but I did, and for the past nine years, it’s done an absolutely bang-up job making sure I have the internets/pipes filled with cats/access to the information superhighway on all my devices. That means it’s time for an upgrade!

Or it was, anyway. Read part one and two of that saga.

Enter: the 10GbE home networking rabbit hole, and cue the OCAU thread with over 1500 posts discussing when 10GbE will become consumer-level technology.

Home networking gear has changed a bit in the past 10 years. 2.5Gb network interfaces are becoming more and more common; my Thunderbolt 4 dock has one, as does the B660 motherboard I built my new NAS with. And at the upper end, it’s not uncommon to find 10GbE RJ45 ports as standard, whether that’s on your top-of-the-line PC motherboard, or the iMac Pro (RIP), or today’s Mac Studio.

Which is why it’s strange that plain ol’ gigabit still seems to be the standard for home networking. Yes, home internet speeds haven’t increased anywhere nearly as much; only within the last couple of years has gigabit internet become possible in Australia, but it’s still uncommon. I think we have other countries to thank for even the adoption of 2.5G as a kind of gateway to faster wired networking speeds, given that in other countries multi-gigabit internet is not only possible, but common. But within that same time period, NVME SSDs have become near-ubiquitous, bringing speed increases of over 20 times their spinning rust predecessors, trading storage capacity for speed. So why are we just now upgrading to home network technology that’s only a paltry two and a half times faster than what we currently have?

There’s a myriad of reasons, including slow internet, but I think the main reason is that for most consumer uses, there’s just not many real reasons to have a faster network connection between your devices. Your Netflix experience isn’t noticeably improved by having a faster connection between your phone or computer, because even mediocre NBN connections can handle a 4K stream of your favourite TV show. Most people aren’t transferring huge files between their computers, so the practical applications of faster network connections are limited, despite computer-specific storage getting faster, not larger. Because if you’re not storing files in the first place, there’s also no need to transfer them between computers. I suspect it’s also why successive Wi-Fi releases have been focused on better Wi-Fi more than they have been about raw speed increases; more efficient usage of the wireless channels we have available, opening up new wireless spectrum, smarter usage of airtime, that sort of thing. If Wi-Fi is already fast enough, even faster speeds benefit few, but more efficient Wi-Fi benefits everyone, even those who aren’t hitting theoretical maxes.

But what if you’re a nerd?

A version of the trickle-down philosophy applied to technology says that as businesses and enterprises upgrade their own equipment, you can often grab upgrades to your own gear for fractions of the cost of what said business would have paid for it originally. I’m not saying that this has completely happened with 10GbE networking gear, but running a 10GbE fibre optic network at home is now within the realms of possibility, and more importantly, at something of a reasonable cost.

If you only have two devices that you want to connect up at 10GbE speeds, you can pick up two SFP+ PCIe cards for about $100 each, connect them directly with a Direct Attach Copper cable for $50-100, and still use standard Ethernet to connect to your switch and your actual internet connection. If you have more than two devices that you want to connect, that’s probably where you’ll need a SFP+ switch of some kind. But even at $130 for an 8-port 10G SFP+ switch on AliExpress, roughly $50 for each SFP+ module, then your optical cables on top of that, it’s still well within the realms of possibility to go to a mostly-fibre home network. And unlike other IT equipment, networking hardware has a lifetime measured in decades. Barring incredible breakthroughs in technology, there’s every possibility that any 10GbE equipment you buy today will be useful in 20-30 years from now, although I’d be slightly concerned about the longevity of your 10GbE SFP+ PCIe cards. For that reason, I’m on the fence about splurging on the 25Gb SFP+ versions. Even though they’re backwards compatible with 1/2.5/5/10Gb, who knows what kind of PCIe tech we’ll have in 20 years. For reference, that’s about the same period of time that it took for PCI to die out and be overtaken by PCIe. Although the PCIe train doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon, it’s foolish to think it’ll be around forever.

The only problem with going to an all-fibre 10GbE home network is that you will, inevitably, have devices that you can’t plug an SFP+ transceiver into. As far as these devices go, you basically have two options. Either you keep using them on standard 1/2.5G copper, or you put them on wireless. Unfortunately, there aren’t any options for an all-in one switch that has 4+ 10G SFP+ ports as well as 4+ 1/2.5G RJ45 ports, so either you’re stuck using 1/2.5G/10G RJ45 transceivers in your SFP+ ports, or you run two switches, one for your optical network, and one for your standard copper one. You can upgrade your copper transceivers to optical ones eventually, but for heat concerns you want to limit how many copper transceivers you’re using, although at 1/2.5G speeds this probably isn’t too bad, I’ve only read about heat issues with 10G copper transceivers.

As it stands, I think it would make little financial sense to upgrade some parts of my network to fibre 10G links. I could direct connect my PC and new NAS with 10G or even 25G, then do my router and switch with at least fibre, but from there it gets tricky. There are few practical ways to do 10G or fibre on laptops and even fewer economically friendly ones — despite Thunderbolt 4 being 40G — so it doesn’t seem worthwhile, and especially not when it would be a downgrade in terms of speeds over the current 2.5G connections. My end-game home networking setup would be 10G between my router and switch, then 10/25G from a switch to every computer that supports it, 2.5G to everything that doesn’t, and wireless everything else.

As fun as a theoretical mostly-fibre network is, its practical uses are limited at best. Probably why faster home networking hasn’t caught on. I’d consider running fibre between my router and switch in the future, just because fibre cabling is slightly less noticeable when I’m skirting it around the edge of my rooms.

But otherwise, 2.5G between computers is plenty fast enough.

Just like 640k of RAM out to be enough for anybody.

The new home network, part II

Previously, on Prison Break:

For the past nine years, a venerable Asus DSL-AC68U wireless modem/router has dutifully been providing access to the pipes filled with cats to all my devices. It’s done its job so well, faultlessly, that I feel like I need to put it out to pasture while it still can be repurposed as someone else’s wireless router. Besides, it’s 2024 now, and the Wi-Fi 5 that it came with is positively pedestrian compared to what we have now, putting aside the glaring limitations of Australian internet speeds or your device’s ability to utilise that kind of speed. Plus, WPA3 is also a thing now too, and any security upgrade is always worthwhile.

The MikroTik Hex has been rock solid as a router. After a solid week of Googleing and configuring, I think I have it set it up just how I want.

In many ways, RouterOS reminds me a lot of when I played with dd-wrt all those years ago. There’s just as many options to configure, and while that means there’s a bit of a learning curve, especially if you want to start from scratch, basically everything is configurable, and there’s very little hand-holding. Want to use one of the Ethernet ports as WAN? Of course, take your pick. Want to remove one of the Ethernet ports from the bridge and use it as a backup/dedicated management port? No problem! RouterOS will tell you when your config is invalid, but it won’t stop you from doing something stupid if it is technically possible. It’s absolutely possible to lock yourself out from your router if you’ve configured management interfaces to be only accessible certain interfaces/network ranges, so it’s absolutely possible to shoot yourself in the foot. If you want, you can start from literal scratch; no DHCP server, no DNS, no firewall rules. I can tell you now; you haven’t truly lived unless you have setup your own DHCP server, even if all that really means these days is ticking a box to turn it on and configuring a few options like your desired IP address range. The next best thing is customising the one that comes with the standard default config, which is what I ended up doing.

But did the Hex fix what marginal levels of bufferbloat I had? Yes, absolutely, although I don’t have SQM1 enabled all the time. For whatever reason, Opticomm FTTP connections are usually over provisioned in that I get slightly faster speeds (usually around 110 Mbps down, 45 Mbps up) than what I actually pay for (100/40), so I have SQM disabled outside of peak periods so I don’t miss out on that little bit of extra speed. It’s a small thing, but the way SQM is most noticeable is when I’m downloading something and watching a YouTube video at the same time. With SQM off, when that download is saturating my connection, my YouTube video drops quality and starts stuttering like it’s buffering over a dial-up connection. But with SQM enabled, I can download something and watch YouTube at the same time, without any loss in quality and without any buffering pauses. It’s a small thing, but SQM has made a minor but appreciable impact on my internet quality. If nothing else, now I can use my internet connection with impunity. Not like I didn’t before, but now I know it will actually work when I want it to, irrespective of whatever else I might be doing.

And yes, the Hex has limitations in terms of throughput with SQM enabled, but thanks to Australian internet speeds, I can save money by having a cheaper router. As it stands, apparently the Hex is good up to about 200-500Mbps with SQM enabled. Given that I’m not planning to upgrade my internet speeds anytime soon, that’s plenty, but if and when I do, a RB5009 (or its successor of the time) has my name on it. I’m still tossing up whether I want to “upgrade” to 250/25 for $4 more per month. While that may not be worth it, I can absolutely recommend SQM on any modern internet connection. If you have a one person household it might not be that big of a deal, but even I’ve noticed it, so I can only imagine how great it would be in a family home.

But honestly, the Hex is too fully-featured for my meagre networking requirements. I’m not running my own ISP, nor do I need any kind of failover. Fancy routing rules for specific traffic, or complicated NAT rules, are also outside of what I want out of my home network. I’m not even using VLANs or anything that would require me to know more about networking than I currently do. But it’s good to know that I can, if I want to in the future, or if my networking circumstances change, I can do all of that without having to redo my entire home network setup.

If I have hesitations about the Hex, is that it’s fairly basic in terms of features. While it does have a microSD card slot and a USB port, there are “only” gigabit Ethernet ports on the thing, no 10G SFP+, no PoE, and I can’t run containers on it like you can on some higher-end MikroTik hardware. It feels bad buying networking gear with only gigabit Ethernet in 2024, but unless I want to spend many hundreds more dollars and buy one of those little fanless mini-PCs that come with 2.5G/10G SFP+ ports and run RouterOS on that, I’m stuck with the hardware that MikroTik currently offers. I think the RB5009 would be great, but as it is, I can probably wait until the next iteration, as there’s basically nothing the Hex doesn’t do for me today. That changes if I get gigabit internet, but I can’t see that happening anytime soon, especially with the state of internet infrastructure in Australia right now. Further compounding this is that while you can get gigabit internet on NBN, the problem here is that Opticomm doesn’t seem interested in competing with the NBN2 or even offering higher speed tiers, so the fastest that I can get is 500/200 at roughly triple what I currently pay. For a one-person household, that just doesn’t seem worth it.

So for now, the Hex has this strange dichotomy between incredible software with mid-tier hardware — fine, capable hardware that’s more than enough for home network usage, but lacking a few niceties and/or esoteric features that would have been “nice to have” in 2024.

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The new home network

Asus DSL-AC68U wireless modem router

Next year will be 10 years since I bought any new home networking gear. Compared to typical IT gear lifetimes, where you’re normally replacing gear every couple of years, hitting double digits on anything is an impressive feat that usually represents one of two things. Either you over-invested to begin with in the name of “future-proofing”, even if you couldn’t fully use the gear at first, or there have been so many other expenses/upgrades ahead of it that you haven’t even thought about upgrading something that works perfectly well. As the old adage goes: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But look, I’m not here to judge your personal technology choices. Merely provide some insight into some of my own, a cautionary tale or two, and some helpful anecdotes along the way. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get all three in a single post, but if not, two out of three ain’t bad.

For the past nine years, a venerable Asus DSL-AC68U wireless modem/router has been dutifully providing access to the interwebs to all my devices. It’s done its job so well, faultlessly, that I feel like I need to put it out to pasture before it starts getting ideas and starting the robot uprising that every sci-fi has warned us about. Besides, it’s 2024 now, and putting aside the glaring limitations of Australian internet speeds or your device’s ability to utilise that kind of speed, the Wi-Fi 5 that it came with is positively pedestrian compared to what we have now. Plus, WPA3 is also a thing now too, and any security upgrade is always worthwhile.

When I was waiting for the internet to be connected in my first apartment, I was able to plug a USB 4G modem into it and have the AC68U share it to all my devices. And when that same apartment joined the 21st century and upgraded to NBN, albeit on the slightly-inferior FTTB version, the AC68U just kept on working. And now that I’m on Opticomm (i.e. non-NBN) FTTP, it just keeps on working. I have no doubt that it would keep doing so until one of two things happened: it releases the magic smoke and spontaneously combusts into a small pile of ash, or the heat death of the universe. Whichever comes first.

That means it’s time for an upgrade! But to what?

Home networking gear is boring in the best possible way. The ideal scenario is that you set it up once, and don’t ever touch it again unless you’re changing something. But if you’re like me, you’ll spend a few weeks every ten years fiddling with it, then never touch it again. That’s basically how I’ve run my AC68U over the years, besides upgrading the firmware every now and again, or forwarding a port here and there. Like I said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I have basically three options for upgrading my home network.

I consider myself pretty lucky (for the purposes of picking home networking gear), in that I live by myself in a small apartment. That means I don’t need a fancy mesh system, or multiple APs to cover the whole thing. Because I’m the only one that uses the network, I can wire up all my computers for the latency and consistency advantages wired connections provide, put everything else on wireless, and have a pretty simple setup overall.

It would have been easy to pick up something like the 2024 version of the AC68U, an all-in-one wireless router. This time around, I won’t even have to buy something with an ADSL modem, because I’m not planning to live in a place with ADSL ever again. But as ugly as the aesthetic of most of today’s wireless routers are, surely there are better options? Some of the Wi-Fi 7 wireless router options from TP Link don’t look too bad, although they are a little on the pricey side. But what if I wanted a slightly less consumer option? After almost a decade with the Asus and never touching all the marketing buzzwords in its web interface and going straight to the advanced settings, what if I wanted to step it up a notch?

Ubiquity seem to be the current flavour of the month for their prosumer networking gear. Their new-ish UniFi Express is a nice little all-in-one that I could probably recommend pretty comfortably to anyone who wanted something configurable, but backed with a great user interface that makes setting it all up easy enough. I can even see myself trying out a UniFi Express to see if I like the Ubiquity ecosystem as a whole, as it’s also a pretty cheap entry point into the UniFi ecosystem. It would probably also be suitable for someone to deploy at a “secondary” site like their parent’s house to replace their ageing network gear, too, and even comes with cool features like remote management.

But as nice as the UniFi Express is, it “only” comes with Wi-Fi 6, so wouldn’t be that much of an upgrade. It’s also lacking some features. There’s no USB port, for example, if you wanted to share a 4G/5G USB modem between all your devices, just like I had to do while I was waiting for the internet to be connected at my place after moving in. That isn’t a huge deal these days given the relatively fast provisioning times of NBN, but it’s a nice to have. There’s also only one LAN port, like Ubiquity expect you to have a switch if you plan to network a few computers together like it’s 1999 or something. It’s a reasonable assumption, but would it have killed Ubiquity to put a few more Ethernet ports on the thing? Fortunately, this also isn’t a big deal for me as I already have a switch connecting my computers together on a LAN like it’s 1999.

Which brings us to the third option, separate out my router, switch, and wireless access point into three separate devices. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with having an all-in-one wireless router, sometimes you just can’t find the right device at the right price. There’s also something about the modularity of having three separate devices, meaning that if you want to upgrade something in the future, you can do so without having to replace everything. But now instead of having one decision to make, I have three! Make that two, on account of the fact I already have a switch. It’s an 8-port, 2.5G RJ45 switch with one 10G SFP+ port from Keeplink, which you can also have for the low price of around $70 if you’re willing to buy it from AliExpress.

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Words

We’ve become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things.

But the most powerful tool on the web is still words.

I wrote these words, and you’re reading them: that’s magical. I’m in a little city in British Columbia; you’re probably somewhere else. I wrote this early in the morning, June 20th, 2013; you’re probably reading it at a different time. I wrote this on my laptop; you could be reading this on your phone, a tablet or a desktop.

You and I have been able to connect because I wrote this and you’re reading it. That’s the web. Despite our different locations, devices, and time-zones we can connect here, on a simple HTML page.

I wrote this in a text editor. It’s 6KB. I didn’t need a Content Management System, a graphic designer, or a software developer. There’s not much code on this page at all, just simple markup for paragraphs, hierarchy, and emphasis.

via Words.

In my never-ending quest for a new blog theme, I’m constantly on the lookout for something that looks similar to the ideal theme I have in my mind, which is as whimsical as a light summer’s breeze. I’ve used the current theme for around two years, and as much as I like it, it might be time for find something new.

Choosing a new theme is harder than it might sound: you can’t just pick any theme that you think looks good. Most of the time, the live demos of potential themes don’t really give you a feel of how your content will look in different skin. When looking for a new theme, you have to consider things like typography and layout, and even then, you still have to worry about the WordPress-specific stuff; post formats, video embeds, images with captions, and so on. You have to be super picky about the theme that you do eventually choose, because it’ll likely represent the whole look and feel of your blog/website for years to come. It’s no small undertaking, if you take it seriously (which you should).

And honestly, one of the hardest things about making choosing  a new WordPress theme is that it’s kind of hard to find something even vaguely suitable, never mind one that has the layout and features you might be looking for. There’s an absolute tonne of themes out there — which you might think is good, until you actually start looking for something that suits your particular site. Check out any theme catalog and you’ll see a million and one themes which are totally unsuitable for a blog. I know that WordPress is now a fully fledged CMS and whatnot, but remember when it was about writing content that you could publish online? What’s with the portfolio/magazine/everything-but-a-focus-on-actual-words themes all over the place? Look at the first nine or so themes on WooThemes — apparently one of the better WordPress theme shops out there — and tell me how many would be suited to, you know, publishing actual words.

Even those statically-built websites (Jekyll, Octopress, and the like) have great default themes. As much as I like WordPress, I’ve been tempted to switch to blogging with Octopress in the past, but haven’t really looked into it seriously. There’s a lot of WordPress advantages that mean I haven’t left just yet. It has an insane community, for starters, and it’s extremely extensible and customisable. Plus, I’m kind-of, sort-of, familiar with PHP, making WordPress a pretty good fit so far. Unfortunately, it’s also a victim of its own popularity: it’s gotten to the point where trying to find the right thing for what you want to do might be more trouble than it’s worth. Maybe I should have backed the Ghost Kickstarter after all.

Either I’m not looking in the right places, or what I’m looking for — a minimalist theme with great typography that’s responsive and optimised for the kind of writing you see right here — just doesn’t exist. To be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever find the perfect WordPress theme. The current theme — Minblr, from Themify — is pretty good, but it’s not perfect. There’s honestly not a lot I could do to improve it without making some major changes, and if I’m going that far, it might just be easier to find another theme altogether, you know?

Of course, I could just go ahead and make my own from scratch, but WordPress themes are a lot of work. Besides, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel — if I can get by with customising something someone else has already made, I’ve saved a tonne of hassle, and probably extended my lifetime by a few years to boot. You don’t know pain until you’ve experienced web development pain.

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What happens if the social web as we know it isn’t actually all that social?

Stephen Marche, The Atlantic:

The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.

On the face of it, it seems crazy: social networking that isn’t social. But like it or not, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and your social network of choice are pretty much everywhere. But what does that mean for you? I mean, aren’t you the one that decides what to post, where? Aren’t you the one that decides how many friends you have, or how privy other people are to your innermost secrets, or at least the ones you choose to share with your fellow socialites? While at least some of that may be true, it doesn’t mean that social networking is all that social. Let me explain.

Almost half of the Australian population uses Facebook. And I can tell you from first-hand experience that Facebook is great! Fantastic, even. When Facebook first launched, I remember the stories of how it meant people could keep in touch with people they thought they had all but lost contact with. There was quite a bit of press about people getting in touch with their teachers from high school, or with long-lost relatives, cousins, friends who had moved to other countries. For most people, that was a great thing: it meant that people didn’t have to track down relatives by calling sixteen different individuals just for an email address, or having to go and do the legwork to get in touch with someone from high school. Anyone could just add their friend on Facebook, and that was that. Easy, right?

Thanks to this thing called the Internet, Facebook suddenly made the world a smaller place. Now it doesn’t matter what country your friends are in, or whether a few streets away, or a few thousand kilometers, because as long as they’re online, you can talk to them in real-time. It doesn’t matter how separated by geographical distance you are, because the internet is everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see your friends in person on a weekly or monthly basis, because the internet is always there.

To reiterate my original question: what happens if social media isn’t all it’s chalked up to be? What happens, instead of connecting people (hi Nokia!), the social web just serves as a reminder for how lonely we all are?

Granted, that’s a rather pessimistic way of looking at things. Perhaps, then, the above statement could be rephrased as such: as well as connecting people, what happens if the social web also serves as a reminder for how lonely we all are? I have friends that only post the most enthusiastic stuff. They’re seemingly always happy. They’re seemingly always content, and never upset, sad, or anything else.

One one hand, that’s great, you know? If they’re happy, I’m happy that they’re happy. But on the other, you have to wonder: if someone is posting about how much they love their significant other, or how great their life is, and I’m here reading their happiest-ever-status, doesn’t that mean my own life is a miserable mess by comparison?

Once again, Stephen Marche:

When I scroll through page after page of my friends’ descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they’re all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers’ market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they’re so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable. A lot of other people doing the same thing feel a little bit worse, too.

It’s this passive consumption that means the social web might not be all it’s chalked up to be, and it’s this passive consumption that means when you read about how great someone else’s life is, your own life will seem less so by comparison.

Real life isn’t like this. You don’t know what the person on the street is feeling. You don’t know what they’re thinking, or how their day is going. If you ask them, you’ll probably find out, but who wants to go around asking total strangers how they’re going, how they’re feeling?

Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I ask myself if any of this social networking stuff is “worth it”. I wonder if keeping up-to-date with Facebook, or Twitter, is “worth it”. What do I gain? The question, once again, could perhaps be better rephrased as: do all these social networks make me feel more connected with people I care about, or less so?

I’d like to think that social media has made our lives better. In ways, it has: it means we can talk to our friends in a different time zone. Social media, the social web, whatever you want to call it, has meant that we can connect with Mac enthusiasts from all over the world. It means that we can connect with famous photographers, people we look up to, and yes, even our long-lost relatives or friends that we just lost touch with.

But there’s always the other side of social media, the side that everyone seems to ignore just because the advantages seem to outweigh the negatives. The side that says you shouldn’t use the social web to supplement your social activities, but instead use it to complement them. The side that says this “passive consumption” is bad for you.

If you’re wondering by now, you should probably read the entire article by Stephen Marche, but I’ll quote him again anyway because it serves as a nice summary. (The article, if you’re wondering, is about whether Facebook makes us lonely, but most of the topics I’ve covered here are one and the same.)

LONELINESS IS CERTAINLY not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine. It’s faster and more efficient, I tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not having to wait with the other customers who are lined up alongside the conveyor belt: the hipster mom who disapproves of my high-carbon-footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the point of tears while she waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine will accept or decline; the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience that I don’t possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up the groceries myself.

There’s some stuff in there that’s for another time, but for now, you’ll excuse me to post about how good — no, great! Fantastic, even! — my life is on all the social networks.