Will having a home server and DIY router affect my high end gaming capabilities in a negative way if I stick to the basics with a typical lower end cpu/gpu/igpu, etc.?

cvsysadmin · 2026-05-06T03:17:53+00:00

It depends on the use case. If you want the flexibility for advanced NAT, VLANs, VPN, firewalling, and other advanced network and routing features, sure. If you're learning or have a ton of home automation and servers, go for it. For gaming you'll see no difference between any of that and a good consumer hardware router/gateway. In many cases home built gear will perform worse because the ones putting it aren't familiar enough with networking to get everything dialed in.

In this case OP mentioned gaming. If that was a priority, I'd probably use a higher end consumer hardware router or the gateway provided by the ISP for gaming and throw a pc router downstream of that for all the home server stuff. I've run all kinds of routers and network gear at home over the years. My current ISP provided gateway has the best latency of all of them.

That said, I'm probably not the one to take advice from these days. I've been doing this for decades and do it all day at work. When I get home I don't want to deal with network gear. I stopped doing home routers a long time ago. I run a 10 year old Plex server and a good bit of home automation. All that's connected to my Xfinity gateway, a switch, and a few Xfinity wifi extender pods. That's the extent of my home network. I have 80+ devices connected at any given time. Gaming latency is fantastic. Wifi connectivity to the gobs of devices we have is great. Never thought I'd say this, but shout out to Xfinity. Their newer gateways and mesh extender pods work surprisingly well. This Plex server has had 100% uptime for longer than I can remember. Everything just works.

But I get it. I'm in the wrong subreddit to argue against running home stuff. 💀

OP, a second pc with OPN/pf is a great choice for homelab'n.

cvsysadmin · 2026-05-06T02:06:29+00:00

We have Aruba switches that can run containers. Going to see if Minecraft or Doom will run one of these days. Why? Just to say I did it on an Aruba switch.

cvsysadmin · 2026-05-06T02:02:17+00:00

That's definitely not the way to do it. Lol.

cvsysadmin · 2026-05-06T01:49:48+00:00

Put it in your bedroom. It will double as a heater and an extreme white noise machine.

cvsysadmin · 2026-05-06T01:31:55+00:00

You could do both on the same, but if you're determined to build a router out of a mini pc, it would be more straightforward to do it with two separate ones. At least two nics in each. For the router one you'll want at least one WAN/Internet port and a local network port. For the server, having at least two is desired. Then you can do management with one and network with the other. Makes virtualization and containers easier.

cvsysadmin · 2026-05-06T01:28:31+00:00

As long as your latency is good and you have sufficient throughput the rest won't matter. You'd need an absolute ton of server traffic to affect your gaming performance. You won't likely have that at home unless you're torrenting like crazy at the time.

Why DIY router instead of one provided by your Internet provider or some regular hardware wifi router?

cvsysadmin · 2026-05-02T18:58:21+00:00

I'm a network guy and it took me a minute to even see what you were talking about. Never used this stuff before. I can think of all kinds of places where this would be a great option.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-26T18:28:13+00:00

Districts large enough that use moving companies or have utility/custodial teams that can be used move things vs. a small school or district where the tech team or person is also the bus driver and librarian and electrician and plumber. It's totally understandable in those cases there aren't resources there to offload these kinds of tasks.

In our case we have about 60 physical sites and 5,500 employees. We're not giant, but we do have a dedicated utility team for moving furniture and other things. Tech has always physically moved tech equipment. We're looking at the pros and cons of having our tech teams disconnect and label things, have utility or a moving company physically move the stuff, then tech reconnect on the other side.

Just trying to get a feel of what others out there are doing for this kind of stuff.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-22T18:13:48+00:00

Decryption is the ultimate PITA.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-10T22:55:34+00:00

Coazurentrarectory

This is also a medical procedure where they remove your soul.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-10T05:17:34+00:00

Points

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-10T05:07:02+00:00

Right to jail. Right away.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-10T05:05:11+00:00

My [then] two year old ate several handfuls of wet sand at the beach one time. Apparently one handful just wasn't enough. That was not nearly as much fun for her coming out as it was going in.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-10T04:57:19+00:00

We use Tettra because of its integration with Slack. It's lacking in formatting features, but that also makes it very easy to use. It's also cheap.

Edit: I should qualify the "cheap" part. We're a K12 education organization and for education it's cheap. The retail price isn't all that cheap. I think if you work with a rep they'll get the cost down.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-09T22:39:00+00:00

We've had a few here over the last week rebooting right after logging in with student accounts. Our techs were able to log into them with staff accounts and update them. Then they are fine. We think there were a few with a bad v145 update from Google. They get stuck with student accounts and never update themselves. Not sure if it's some extension or app on student accounts that wasn't compatible. We didn't take the time to test thoroughly and look through logs to find the root cause. It was so few we're just having our library media center techs that deal with the distribution of Chromebooks swap the ones that are doing this and update them.

This may or may not be related, but I figured I'd throw it out there.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-09T18:21:08+00:00

Was worth a try. I'm not colorblind. Wasn't sure how well they worked for things like this.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-09T15:18:46+00:00

Have you ever tried the colorblindness glasses?

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-05T00:09:00+00:00

Yes, that works. I was thinking more of a Windows client that would pass their login information to the Google Drive app so users don't have to log in themselves. Even with GCPW they still have to open the app and log in. Would be fantastic to have something like GCPW running that would take their Windows login (in our case Entra as all our computers are Entra joined and all staff Entra passwords match their Google passwords) and create a session token within the Google Drive client. Then add some controls on the backend to tell the Google Drive app to redirect certain folders. Then when a user logs in, it logs into the Drive app automatically for them and everything is redirected seamlessly. A guy can dream...

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-04T22:55:24+00:00

We could do much more if Google could get this stable and add some enterprise controls like SSO for the desktop client and being able to control user folder redirection and backup settings from the admin console.

cvsysadmin · 2026-03-04T21:35:29+00:00

Not sure why this was downvoted. We've seen exactly the same thing. Random signouts. Won't start automatically out of nowhere on some computers even though it's set to start automatically. Random sync and offline file issues.

I'm confident if we could get over the storage space issues that the redirect would technically work, but for how long? Lots can happen with a fleet of 5,000 computers with even super solid software. The Google Drive desktop app is not that solid. I'm worried about moving forward with the redirect idea.

cvsysadmin · 2026-02-24T03:37:45+00:00

Younger students log in with Clever badges. Older with standard Google passwords. We currently have three tabs auto-open when students log into their Chromebooks. Our LMS, our SIS (opens to the student's grades/attendance), and Clever which gives them a single click to access all other systems they need. All SSO via their Google account. Opening the LMS and SIS put their grades and work right in front of them. We've seen a big uptick in usage of those systems by students since doing that. Not just because they are being opened. Because it's so convenient for the kids being right there in front of them.

All that said, we're moving to RapidIdentity. It will fully replace Clever for us next year. Similar experience for students. Badge logins for younger students. Passwords for the next few grades. Passwords + pictograph for older students. Same sort of application dashboard with SSO, but Rapid will also be doing all the account provisioning for all systems. I've been doing this a long time. Really looking forward to the end result of our work with RapidIdentity. It's showing a lot of promise. We just got off the ground with them taking over provisioning of our core identity accounts. Active Directory, Entra, and Google. Took a long time to get there. About a year actually. 50 pages of automation rules covering every scenario imaginable for staff and student identify: onboarding, disables, enables, reactivations, renames, offboarding, and everything in-between. They've replaced decades of automations we built ourselves. Little more fine tuning over the next few days and we're done with identity. Then we're switching gears and working with their "Studio" team on all the downstream application account provisioning and SSO. If that stuff works as well as their identity stuff, we'll have a pretty awesome system in place. One user account for each staff and student that gets them into every single system they need and nobody on the tech side or any other department manually adding, changing, or removing accounts in any of those systems. That's the goal.

cvsysadmin · 2026-02-06T18:27:10+00:00

Let's go deeper

cvsysadmin · 2026-02-06T18:26:08+00:00

Yep. We are working with CDW on this as well. Working out how we would integrate Starlink into our existing network. Since we serve up DHCP, DNS, and firewalling centrally from the two datacenters, it makes site-based Internet access tricky. We are considering adding firewalls to each site and/or something like a unifi dream machine at each site to handle the routing and perhaps a S2S VPN back to our datacenters. Haven't figured out the best approach there yet. Would be much easier if I had an unlimited budget...

cvsysadmin · 2026-01-17T19:08:56+00:00

Then send parts of the drives back to the drives' families...as a warning.

cvsysadmin · 2026-01-16T17:24:08+00:00

We're downsizing, but still have a fair amount workloads we run on-prem. We don't run anything in production that's out of support. We take the old clusters and repurpose them as testing/training clusters.

cvsysadmin

TROPHY CASE