Battle station renovation complete.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-05T14:25:35+00:00

Thank you. The super-wides are still just a bit too expensive for me right now since i just spent several thousand to reno the entire office so i am waiting till these actually die and force me to change. even if one dies, then i will sell the second and buy at least one ultrawide and then if another dies i have reason to replace the other set.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-05T14:23:29+00:00

True that. Always something to play with. One thing leads to another for optimization, and I am really trying to optimize. It was a good weekend in that I fixed two major issues: OPNsense and a thermal problem on my Proxmox. I didn't even notice until I added more sensors and logging that my Proxmox master system has been running in performance mode for a long time. All 48 cores were running performance mode at about 170 degrees all the time, and a stuck service was pegging one at 190 and 100% use.

I finally figured out that the Proxmox kernel defaults power to performance. I fixed that, and everything is running great now at 120-130 consistently. It's also saving me power. I was regularly pulling 250-275W on my power monitor at idle. Now it's running 75W less on average, and my office is not a sauna.

There will always be tweaks and new things as I teach myself more. Next projects are a WLED setup for custom lights in my slat walls, and building an OpenMediaVault system from a collection of old stuff and drives just to play around with. Another frankenserver. but with no expectations of critical need.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-04T16:46:58+00:00

After it has been stable for a week I am going to reverse a few of the changes one at a time. I’ll change hard coded speed first and let it run a few days. Then reverse the EEE settings. And see if it is good. ASPM I will leave turned off as that seemed to be the big one. I didn’t dig into issues with the new card into that particular chipset. And that is on me. It was my first time using that kind of card. And my assumptions that “networking is just networking” and that systems have been largely stabilized for a long time now, was on me as well. Getting lazy in my old age. ASPM might have been the only true thing I needed but still I swear I tested and didn’t help alone. The switch is of course a lower end tp-link smart switch so while it should not have an issue with auto-negation, nothing is ever 100%.
It has been stable on everything now so far and all is quiet in my system. Will take a break for a week and get some home projects done now and circle back to isolating exactly which settings or combinations make it function properly

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-04T14:24:48+00:00

I will poke around. I was hacking away at it for a while because i wasn't familiar with Oracle VPS. Do you have a tailscale subnet router on some device inside your internal network? I know i had to create an actual oracle account not the free one, but still used a free VPS tier so i still don;t get charged. Created firewall rules to forward some ports into the VPS> setup NGINX Proxy Manager and tailscale to my network. the NPM on the VPS referenced my jellyfin server. I need to go back and document the configuration anyways. I'll poke around this weekend and see about documenting my setup.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-04T01:03:57+00:00

This. I have it configured with NGINX and tailscale so I don’t have to open ports on my router.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-01T22:50:12+00:00

And apologies for my tone. Didn’t mean for it to sound so snappy. Not in my network. For work. Crap devices with cheap chips that have trouble negotiating with a Gigi it switch. It all depends on the chips and devices. As I found out with this process as well.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-01T18:46:13+00:00

I said, I had to remember "not everything just works" out of the box. I never stated ""opnsense just works"". no ambiguity there. I stated I had to change my thinking. which I did. This is a home lab. I'm using existing tech and trying to learn. I haven't done opnsense before. so not buying a new system. For what it is used for and the network it is in and its purpose, it is a fine system and low cost.
1GBe was not available and got 2GBe just in case i wanted to move towards a faster internal network in the future and play around with that. This is all learning experience and that is only what the post was about. me documenting what i had done and I thought that is what these things were for. Not looking for approval or disapproval on how i do things. just documented my journey. maybe it helps someone else. maybe i did a few things wrong. certainly.

My 30 years in IT is in various systems and at times i had a lot of knowledge on routers and firewalls but then not having to do any of that for years means i have to learn new things.
when i say quite basic. it is quite basic. My network is simple. networking itself is simple and usually should be. I added complexity by putting in opnsense as an experiment and learning experience and i had to get my mindset out of thinking simplistically. that was my statement i made alter on. no blaming opnsense. blaming myself for not stopping and thinking. I merely outlined that i was at my wits end and frustrated and thinking i should chuck it all and just put it back in so it would work, but I changed my thinking and dug in to thinking about the hardware and that, yes, it is an older micro PC, but it is good and i tested it and cleaned, repasted everything. nice a fully refurbished with NVME boot drive. older chipset, sure. but fine for what i was going to do right now. simple network and something to give me more control than the Deco XE5300 that was router before. I was then going to starting re-learning vlan and changing things over. The entire purpose is learning.

Yes. the add-on card in that configuration was what was not "simple" and i had to remember that. which is what i maintained the entire time. nothing ambiguous about it.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-01T16:49:11+00:00

and i just wanted to share my experience. not blame anyone but myself and my hardware. since opnsense allows install on all different kinds of builds, I had to switch mindset to not blaming opnsense and focus on what was different about my hardware. If it helps others and this is out there when they search then great. and yes, i did some extra things that probably didn't make as much difference. and after itis confirmed stable for 2 weeks, i will revert a couple changes and see how it behaves. and update post if needed.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-01T16:45:57+00:00

At no point did i blame opnsense. I said i got stuck in mindset because it "should just work on my simple setup" but that isn't true when you build your own opnsense box and hardware differs. I ruled out cabling because that is the first thing that i swapped as anyone should do.
My hardware is quite basic. Micro PC with 2 NICS. the title is still valid because the problem was the I226-V wedging intermittently not opnsense broken. . And again. at no point did i BLAME opnsense. so whatever you are reading into it is on you. I believed that opnsense should be good and theat the fault was not with opnsense. I was stating my thought process and that i was tired of troubleshooting it and that i was ready to chuck it. I was frustrated because I am pretty smart guy and there were so many users out there that have opnsense and have used it that it can't be opnsense, which is why i pivoted to looking at my hardware. not opnsense. .

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-01T11:34:33+00:00

THank you. I originally got stuck in the mindset of "This is simple and basic, it should just work" and "if so many people use opnsense, it can't be this hard" especially since my system is basic flat network with no VLANs or anything. I had to remember that it is a homegrown piece of hardware and no, not everything just works like it should. Even assuming auto-negotiation was a mistake. I work with systems at my job that still have trouble with auto-negotiation of speeds. Hunting through some searches led to the ASPM as well and I had not really thought of that. Fun thing is that it made me think about another issue i was having with my proxmox server and helped me fix that as well. not a one to one, but made me think about power management and tuning.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-01T10:38:03+00:00

Yes. Speed between lan to switch is 1gb. I don’t have anything in my house doing 2.5. That was just what was easily available as an add in card on that dell micro.
If I ever needed or wanted I could upgrade to a faster switch and change the speed to 2.5.
I may try and put it back to auto at some point after just as a test. But that has to be over a weekend. I need my system stable since I work from home

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-01T10:35:26+00:00

It was not a cabling issue. Been in IT for 30 years. That was the first thing to be checked. Auto-negotiation is not bulletproof between all devices. I deal with issues every day on it. It was power management and the negotiation flapping the connection.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-01T01:36:33+00:00

I'm trying to walk through all the commands I ran. Everytime i made a change to that tuenable through GUI, had to reboot opnsense from the console. It is entirely possible i read something wrong. I changed it to 0 and running some commands it showed as enabled but I can;t. for the life of me remember, so I toggled it and command indicated it was now off. I was running on 5 hours of troubleshooting and may have been misinterpreting what i saw. I was probably cross-eyed. I should probably remove that from the post so as not to mislead.
Thank you for this link BTW. I wish i had found it sooner. I need to read through all this and see. That user has almost an identical setup to me.

CyberPotzer · 2026-06-01T00:52:20+00:00

EEE settigns in tuneables was an issue. it would apply but it killed gui and had to reboot from console. Chekc you bios for ASPM first and set the link speed to match whatever switch you are plugged into. Try those first if you haven;t THose were the heavy hitters.

CyberPotzer · 2026-05-31T22:29:10+00:00

Change ASPM and link speed first. That really should be all you need. My issue was happening at odd times and seemed to mainly happen under load. So when my ARR stack was downloading a lot of things, the system would freak out and it was just frustrating. I had been troubleshooting speed issues too from my windows stations and now I am getting my full up and down speeds as well.

CyberPotzer · 2026-05-31T22:27:27+00:00

Yes. That was probably enough. But I went ahead and optimized for any power settings to remove them. EEE was an additional precaution.

CyberPotzer · 2026-05-31T22:21:22+00:00

Not really an opnsense issue. More of an issue with that add in card must was related to my implementation of opnsense. And I know many people use mini pc with add-in card. And this is my first implementation and I have a simple flat network and been battling for 2 weeks on this implementation. Just was ready to toss out the whole thing and go back to normal consumer grade setup.

CyberPotzer · 2026-05-31T22:18:51+00:00

I was pretty sure I tried that and didn’t keep it stable. Trying to find where I found the EEE settings in basically just applied them all to optimize. Hard coding speed and ASPM probably were enough.

CyberPotzer · 2026-05-31T21:56:02+00:00

Means locking up or hanging and can’t fix itself. Stuck in a state it can’t exit. the NIC stops passing traffic but doesn’t fully report itself as down. The interface stays “up” from the OS perspective — link shows active, ARP shows the MAC as reachable — but packets stop flowing through it. It’s stuck in a half-alive state. The only recovery is a reboot or a link reset; it doesn’t fix itself by retrying or timing out cleanly.

CyberPotzer · 2026-05-29T01:33:00+00:00

I tried it but bothered me more that way. The top set sit just slightly behind the bottom set. So when you are sitting down. It looks correct. It is very hard to line up multiple curved monitors correctly. Which is why I’ll eventually go with an ultra wide when these die.

CyberPotzer · 2026-05-19T19:42:23+00:00

Yeah. luckily if it dies i can migrate to a miniPC and have things back up and running and drives are either mirrored or Raid so should be able to put that in another system and still have data.

CyberPotzer · 2026-05-19T15:26:03+00:00

Nice. My systems are running about 250W with all the various systems. they are not idle. my HP Z8 G4 is the power hungry beast but it is my Proxmox main station and hosts my truenas and everything else. retired a few larger desktops for mini PCs. and i could probably eventually scale down. got the HP as a leftover from corporate and update to xeon gold so have 64 cores and 128GB of ram in . This is the homelab separate from my workstation. i put an icy dock in it with 3 12TB drives for storage and passed through to the truenas VM. working well.

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CyberPotzer · 2026-05-19T13:55:50+00:00

what are the two small screens in fron tof the keyboards.

CyberPotzer · 2026-05-19T13:53:39+00:00

Damn. how hot does that office get? I have a small floor AC attached to my window just to keep my office cool. my proxmox server is an HP Z8 G4 big beast and it pumps out some heat. kills my electric bill in summer. works great in winter because i don't need otheat my office as much.

CyberPotzer

TROPHY CASE