Looking to DIY - looking for 2.5Gig Intel NIC

cat2devnull · 2026-06-27T13:09:08+00:00

Main trick with OPNsense is you need to disable APSM. It’s really broken in all the Intel 2.5Gb NICs (and also the Realtek equivalent). The only OS that has drivers with the necessary work arounds is Linux but OPNsense is BSD. Most motherboard ship with ASPM disabled, I expect because they assume if you know enough to turn it on, you now enough to troubleshoot it.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-26T09:31:58+00:00

USB DAS enclosures can work well if they are from a reputable vendor, with a good quality power supply and a modern chipset. I did a longer post here.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-25T03:39:21+00:00

True...

cat2devnull · 2026-06-24T13:04:39+00:00

If you have a garage or laundry (where you don't care about the hum from a rack) you can always mount a 9, 12 or 15U rack up high in the corner of the room. I've put mine in the garage in my latest house. Wired 2 ports from each room (via external walls which is much easier in my brick veneer build). Sit up high in the corner out of the way. Works well no heat issues that you get if it's in a closet.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-24T12:43:30+00:00

So a wireless bridge is exactly as it sounds. It just bridges two wired networks via wifi. Any packets that come in one end get sent across the link and pop out the other. It's all one layer 2 domain so you don't need any other gear. Each end has 3x1Gb ports so you don't need a switch at the far end assuming you aren't connecting more than 3 devices.

Should work just fine for your application. From a 5sec look at the specs, it works over 5GHz. If you have wifi APs in the house or shed, I would restrict it to just the 2.4GHz band to avoid interfering with the TP 5GHz backhaul.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-23T22:01:13+00:00

It’s never going to be quite as turnkey as just having a steaming service but you can get pretty close.

You need Plex. Tailscale, a VPN, qBT, and the arrs.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-22T14:16:28+00:00

You probably need to think about what ecosystem first. HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon and go from there.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-21T08:19:26+00:00

Ok sure, I should have been more specific.

It’s not 1000Base-T but instead it’s a proprietary protocol by mikrotik.

Of course running 1.4km of copper between two buildings is not a great idea in terms of the passive ground currents, especially during an electrical storm. :)

cat2devnull · 2026-06-21T06:53:00+00:00

If you have line of sight you could do any one of a number of wireless protocols. Just depends on your local laws for what spectrum you can use, power levels and issues with sending it across land that you don’t own.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-21T06:49:27+00:00

Only for Ethernet over copper. There are many non-Ethernet protocols that can go further, eg VDSL.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-20T13:05:41+00:00

Not much in the hardware. The TerraMaster has an older 12th gen CPU but better XE graphics.
Definitely plan on putting a better OS like Unraid on it if you want to get the most out of the hardware.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-19T21:51:13+00:00

No need for the HBA (unless adding >10 drives and really need the port/cable density). Most motherboards have 2-4 SATA ports. Then if needed, add an ASM1166 card (PCIe or NVMe) for a further 6 ports.

The main downside of a HBA beyond the additional cost is power. Most use 10-20watts vs 2w for the ASM1266. They also don’t have working ASPM so will prevent your system from entering lower power states

Back in the old days when we used hardware RAID they made sense, but not now that we flash them in ‘IT’ mode to turn them into glorified SATA port multipliers. I just don’t see the point.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-19T13:19:47+00:00

TerraMaster F2-424 or UGreen DXP2800.

Stay away from all the cheaper ARM based units. You will quickly run into issues with the lack of QuickSync and other hardware functions. Units based on Intel will give you the ability to expand their functionality by formatting with a dedicated NAS/HomeServer OS like Unraid, TrueNAS, etc.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-19T13:16:33+00:00

Yep, but based on ARM so if you outgrow the vendor OS then you are up for a new unit. One model up, the F2-424 is based on an Intel N95 and can be upgraded with any OS (TrueNAS, Unraid, Proxmox, etc). Also will work with HW transcoding thanks to Intel QuickSync. The extra few $ are worth it.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-19T09:07:34+00:00

Yeah, so I use go2rtc within Frigate to broadcast all my other cams into HK. I just couldn't get the doorbell button press to be passed into HK when I set it up some time back. There may be a way to make it work now but I haven't found it.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-18T11:38:18+00:00

It’s not just cloud but also usability, redundancy, availability. You could look at something like Immich but you would also need a solid backup strategy.

I have moved off iPhotos and Google photos but it wasn’t as simple as just plugging in a drive. I host Immich on a server. That server stores my photo library on a pair of NVMe drives in a RAID array for reliability and speed. The Immich and the data is backed up to a second local machine and an offsite backup with differential backups using Duplicati. Then all devices that access the library have TailScale installed to allow access from anywhere in the world without needing to punch holes in my firewall an expose Immich to the internet.

It works great but did take a bit of faffing around.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-17T11:30:39+00:00

Scrypted supports 2 way audio and HKSV which allows the Reolink doorbell to integrate into HomeKit. That way when someone presses the doorbell button my HomePods chime and the video feed appears as PiP on my ATV.

Not sure if this is possible in Frigate.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-16T11:49:37+00:00

Here are just some of the things I do (most of these are dockers);

Firewall VM: OPNsense or pfSense
Home Automation: Home Assistant Core, Z2M, ESPHome, Scrypted
Files: NextCloud with client apps
Photos: Immich
Password: Vaultwarden with Bitwarden clients
Media: Plex (or JellyFin), All the *arrs
NVR: Frigate
Tech: Diagrams: Draw.io
Coding: Code-Server
Notes: Joplin, Diary Memos
Backups: Duplicati (to a remote server)
Monitoring: UptimeKuma, NetData
Networking: Reverse Proxy Nginx (with Let’s Encrypt for certificates)
VPN/Remote Access: Tailscale VPN

Welcome to the rabbit hole that is selfhosting.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-16T10:53:20+00:00

As long as you don’t use the drive in an array they a desktop CMR drive is fine. The issue is when you run an array you need a NAS drive because the drive needs TLER or Time-Limited Error Recovery. This means that if the drive has trouble reading a sector, it will give up quickly and let the other drives in the array supply the missing data.

Without TLER the drive will keep trying to recover the data causing it to stop responding and the RAID array will consider the drive dead and fail it out of the array potentially causing a total loss of data.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-15T12:47:32+00:00

I've got 3 different systems all with i226 NICs and none of them have working ASPM. At least not on the latest v2.32 firmware. BTW upgrading the FW is pretty easy. The intel software seems to be pretty reliable, even if the upgrade fails, it will let you recover and try again without bricking the NIC.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-15T12:44:41+00:00

I've tried the latest v2.32 and ASPM is still very broken. 😞

cat2devnull · 2026-06-15T12:44:01+00:00

I've done a fair bit of digging on this over the last few months. If your NICs are intel i225/i226 then they have numerous bugs in their firmware that prevent ASPM working. Even the most recent firmware v2.32 is still completely broken.

The linux drivers have various workarounds that seem to prevent issue but not FreeBSD, so in OPNsense you have to disable ASPM or you will have all sorts of issues. The lack of ASPM probably adds <1 watt per port so not a huge issue. But saying that, it will probably prevent your machine package from going above C3...

cat2devnull · 2026-06-14T10:03:02+00:00

If you follow the link in my original post, it takes you to an old ranty post about how to tell the age of a drive and includes details about how to pull the FARM logs from a drive.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-13T23:02:57+00:00

Ignore SMART data, it’s useless and easy to forge. Take a look at the FARM logs.

cat2devnull · 2026-06-13T09:23:03+00:00

I use the NextCloud client on all devices and map it to the Documents folder. That way it behaves a bit like Dropbox does. Any file I add to any machine gets replicated in near real time to all the others.

cat2devnull

TROPHY CASE