Future Plans & Upgrades

This is just a quick writeup of some problems with my current setup, some limitations, issues I have with it, and where I would like to see this home network project land during my next revision.

Some Smaller Tweaks

I'd like to re-assign some of the IP addresses on the network to follow better practice. My static IPs should live in the .2-.99 space with non-static falling within the .100-.199 range. Many of these were reserved some time ago and I did not think much of it. Doing a final pass of cleaning this up would be nice.

Expand the storage pool at the Ubuntu R3 server. This is also an easy fix as there are two 1TB NVME drives sitting dormant internally right now. That said, I really don't need to expand at this very moment. If I find an alternate use for those later on I would like to be able to utilize them. Especially with the current price of NVME drives.

Run a hardwire to the backup server. Right now it is running on WiFi. I might table this one, because ideally this system should truly live off site. But as mentioned elsewhere, I already keep critical data cold stored off site. I might even take another shot at a different backup system in the future.

Expensive-ish Tweaks

I'd like to see about getting a taller rack and moving it away from a wall. Rear access is not great currently. I will need some more rack space if some of the below changes are made.

Source a proper managed switch that I can rackmount. The TPLink switch has gates around trunking/tagging. They want me to use their cloud services or controllers for central management, which I do not want to do. Also, this switch is basically at capacity. On top of all of this, it shuts off sometimes when plugging and un-plugging ethernet cables. I thought it was a power budget issue on the PoE side causing it, but I am nowhere near capacity.

If I do acquire a rack mounted switch I would like to see about getting a punchdown-less patch panel as well to keep the front cables organized.

My current wireless system is not great. As mentioned elsewhere, I am just using a manually tweaked matching SSID setup in lieu of a mesh configuration. Mesh would be awesome but not required. Something that can support VLANs would be ideal as I am trying to migrate all untrusted devices to a segregated VLAN, and right now I don't have wireless capability for this VLAN, just hardwire. My current APs I have now apparently do support VLANs, but I cant tag ports on the current switch. On top of everything else, the WiFi cuts out sometimes. I thought I had a bad AP. Then I purchased the second one, same issue. I did firmware upgrades. Ran cross network ping logging across many devices to see if I could pin-point what was happening or isolate the problem. Checked all AP logs over and over. Still have not been able to solve the issue. Then these APs phone for a controller every 10-15 seconds or so with no way to disable this. I have 14,000 omada DNS-Discovery requests from these devices over the last 24 hours. Some of their APs have a disable function, mine do not, at least not currently.

A UPS for the rack would also be a nice to have. Even a small one.

Other Ideas

I have a dormant 12c/24t 1920x Threadripper with 32G of RAM (x399 platform) sitting in a closet right now collecting dust. This was my old machine. I have gone back and forth on the idea of using this as my primary server. There would be a couple of downsides. Even with undervolting and underclocking I think idle power draw could still float around 100 watts and currently the entire rack idles around 100 watts. The 500 watt EVGA PSU sitting in the chassis currently would also probably need a swap-out. And due to it going in a 2U chassis, a low profile cooling solution would need to be implemented. With power also comes heat and probably more noise, unless I get it on water. This is not a server grade platform, its an HEDT platform. The upsides though could be very interesting. With 12 cores I can start messing with VMs and things like Proxmox. It would also come with double the RAM and come with a large quantity of PCI-E lanes. The motherboard also has four NVME slots. So the storage expansion issues I encountered on the A520 platform would be a non-issue here.

I'd like to maybe take another stab at revising the full storage stack here for ease of use. There are alternatives to things like TreuNAS such as Unraid, which also supports community apps/dockers. I will sit with the current setup for a while longer and see what direction I'd like to go in.