My attempt to upgrade my home network
All of this started as a simple plan to just swap out my ISP provided gateway for another off the shelf home router. But, things quickly grew from there, and by November of last year, the plan started looking like a whole home network overhaul.
My plan was to swap out my ISP provided gateway for a thin client that ran OPNsense, plug in a bunch of USB 3.0 to ethernet adapters with an ASIX chipset, which from what I had read, worked well with FreeBSD, the OS that OPNsense is based on, and hook up a wireless access point and network switch to those adapters. It was a bit janky, but I thought it should still work.
When all the pieces came in December, I installed OPNsense on the thin client and set up the network switch and wireless access point, and all seemed to go well.
This was, of course, until I did some speed tests, and saw that I was getting a horrible 200 MB/s down, and 80 MB/s up. I should have been getting at least 950 MB/s both ways, since I have a gigabit WAN link. Something wasn't right, so I took the whole setup apart and put the ISP provided gateway back into service.
What followed after was hours of configuration tweaking with OPNsense and iperf3 speed tests. In the end though, the culprit ended up being those USB 3.0 to ethernet adapters I was using for LAN. Turns out, they weren't as reliable as I originally thought. After some more research, it looks like they can be quite flakey in fact.
I felt pretty stupid for making this oversight. I guess I was so focused on the power efficency of the whole setup that I completely missed this crucial flaw. But alas, at least I knew what I did wrong, and I can now focus on creating a setup that will actually work at full speed.
I will be buying a dell optiplex 3040 or 3050 in the SFF form factor, and an intel gigabit PCIe network card with 2 or 4 RJ45 jacks. These SFF optiplex systems only accept half height cards of course, so i'll have to swap out the bracket for a half height one if it is not already present on the card that I purchase. Intel gigabit PCIe cards work the best in OPNsense, and this is the setup that is typically seen in use with home OPNsense boxes.
I'll update all of you on the new setup when I get around to getting it put together, so stay tuned.
Signed,
Primrose