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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1 is required at minimum, there is no maximum
I’m so confused by your question.
What scenerio would require multiple Ethernet ports? Is two or even one sufficient for what I want to do?
Off the top of my head, here are a few scenarios where you would like multiple network ports, none of which you are likely to need to worry about.
- You only have gigabit network devices, but you’re running a file server that you expect to often have multiple devices utilizing concurrently, so you connect all those devices to the same switch that the file server is plugged into and you implement bonding to increase the throughput to/from the server.
- You are virtualizing a router, so you need a WAN port as well as a LAN port.
- You have mostly gigabit devices, but you want a really fast connection between two servers or between your server and a workstation, so you add 10 Gbps or higher network cards to those machines and you connect them directly.
- You’re running a high-availability cluster and you want to use a ceph pool, so you use a second network port on each device for the ceph network.
You don’t need two ports for a router. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router_on_a_stick
#1 seems like something I understand and could use but doubt I really need that. The other things you mention I don’t fully understand what they are and since you say I probably don’t need to worry about them then I won’t.
I believe I’ll need to use a second port to add an ePOE hub for a few cameras though.
Thank you!
I believe I’ll need to use a second port to add an ePOE hub for a few cameras though.
You mean a POE network switch? You can run POE powered devices on the same network as everything else, so you don’t need an extra port for that.
Specifically POE security cameras. So those can be connected to my all-in-one router and thus to my server running Frigate? That’s good to understand. Thank you
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.
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!
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)
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.
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
I’ve seen it done in data center environments where there are two connections to two different switches - so you can do maintenance on either switch without downtime.
Same reason for having dual power feeds to each machine.
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.What is port bonding exactly? Extra throughput by using two ports from the same ISP?
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.
Thank you. I don’t think I have a good need for this feature so that’ll save me a port.
Adding to thejevans’ answer, if you were running a network analysis tool like Snort, it would be easier if you had multiple ports.
Remember a homelab can be anything from multiple rack mounts humming along in your basement to just SBC running some clever Podman containers. Everyone’s wants, needs, and interests are different.
Sounds like most of what you want to do could be done with one or two machines, a decent switch, and some kind of Wi-Fi access point. There is no wrong or right way to do it.
Unless you’re planning on virtualizing your router on the server (think OPNsense VM or something) then really only one ethernet port is required. Otherwise the sky is the limit. For example, mine has a 1 Gbps port, a 2.5gbps port, and two 10 Gbps ports.
Depends on what you want/need and whether you want to future proof I guess.
So really just one port to connect the server to the router for everyone to have access is what I’m understanding? So then that leaves me with one extra to use with an ePOE hub to then add all my cameras to.
Yah if all you want is for your server to get internet and have it accessible on your LAN, one port is all you need.
Perfect, thank you.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System PoE Power over Ethernet SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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i didnt have a problem with network ports (I use a switch) what I shouldve considered during purchasing was the number of drives (sata ports), pcie features (bifurcation, version, number of nvme slots)
I need to do high IOPs for my research now and I am stuck with raid0 commodity SSDs in 3 ports.
For what it’s worth, I have a server with two rj45s (and a third for BMC), but I only plugged one of them into my switch. I run anywhere from 2-8 containers/vms on that server and never felt the need to hook up the other jack. I guess there’s probably some contention of running multiple hosts all through that one connection, but typically I don’t really need anything faster than the ~2-400mbps I get with WiFi anyway. So to answer you question, it depends, but I would generally say maybe start with the one and don’t worry about it unless you’re really moving massive amounts of data regularly and saturating your line. You’d also need to consider you’ll need a switch and other network hardware capable of handling that throughout as well if you’re really going to potentially saturate those ports.
Thank you. This gives a lot of context and makes sense. I think I’ll use the second port for an ePOE hub for the cameras and the pcie slot for the Coral. Right now I use a half decent all-in-one router with OpenWRT but have been wanting to upgrade to get AX WiFi. I’ll look into makinging sure I get competent hardware.
Im using 10gb network cards in my homelab. My vm server has an extra 1gb port for an outside interface on multiple pfsesne vms that i use to route traffic over vpn tunnels.
Then on my nas i have 10gb to a switch with the vm servers. It has another 1gb interface that i run directly to another nas. It uses that direct link to backup data nightly.
