Also multiple ethernet ports mean you can segment the network: not put the doorbell on the same network as the banking data. You can do that on a switch with VLANs, but to do that you need a more expensive switch.
Theo
It seems to be a different product, but with similar pricing. Here's Zen's pricelist which isn't bad:
Since this is Openreach I'm sure they'd like to keep it in the BT family, but you should be able to buy from any OR ISP.
Theo
Good question...
Hmmm, possibly:
ok if you are in Epping Forest by the sounds of it.
According to the interactive map:
we are coloured blue, which does not actually match any of the colours in the key! So no idea what that means...
Can you put that in simple English that a a mere professional IT network engineer can understand?
What are 'multiple Ethernet ports' in this context, please, and how do they differ from what a switch has anyway?
"up to" and how far does it get down the copper? BT shoved a cabinet at the exchange and muttered something about G.fast. I had a quick google and AFAICT at our distance, 3 km or so, ii makes sod all difference to the speed no matter what you use ADSL2 ADSL2+ VDSL G.fast.
3G wozzat? No there is a 3G signal here if you stand bya window upstairs on the right side of the house.
That could be in the right place but getting a suitable data tariff might be tricky, light month this month only 51.2 GB download. Also a static, public, IPv4 address and availabilty of IPv6.
They would only put them on existing fibre routes and then only at "fibre nodes" (joins). FTTrN is (was?) one of my straws as the new fibre route to the village was reputed to have a fibre node 200 m away in the upstream direction.
5 years ago BT used a government grant to put fibre down the roads and up the poles around here but it's not connected to any of the houses - "no commercial premises - so economically not viable"! - WHY did they do it? To stop Virgin Media who inherited ancient cabling getting the grant.
Alan
Virtual LANs allow you to run separate networks over the same physical cabling.
For instance, you might trust the doorbell network (physically exposed on the outside of your building) less than the one handling credit card data, and don't want them able to communicate. But your site topology might mean you have to use the same physical link for connecting them.
Let's assume you have one ethernet cable you want to send both traffic down. You do this by using VLAN-enabled switches. You put a VLAN-enabled switch at each end. You then decide on a VLAN numbering scheme, for instance:
VLAN 123 = doorbell VLAN 456 = accounting
You then configure switch A for port 1 to be on VLAN 123 and port 2 to be on VLAN 456. You do the same for switch B. You plug in the doorbell kit to port 1 and credit card kit to port 2.
You select port 3 to carry all 'tagged' frames, and link the switches with your one cable between their port 3s.
+-------------------------------+ | Switch A | doorbell -|-port 1--[tag=123?]-+ | | X--port 3 -|-- VLAN tagged frames on one link accounts -|-port 2--[tag=456?]-+ | | | +-------------------------------+ [and the same at the other end]The switches 'tag' packets going out on port 3, in other words the packet over the link looks like:
[VLAN tag=123][Ethernet header][IP header][IP payload][checksums]and then route based on the tag, rather than routing to all ports. Because the tag says VLAN 123, each switch now conveys this only between port 1. For this traffic, it's as if the other ports didn't exist. Effectively you have two isolated networks running over a single cable.
The downside is that you need a management interface on each switch to configure this, that means the switch having a webserver, CPU, etc. This makes the switches more expensive. It's also more work to configure and maintain.
This is fairly standard enterprise networking, and not uncommon if your business is large enough to buy switches from Cisco rather than Belkin.
(Some cheapo switches support it too - for instance there's a 10 pound TP-Link gigabit 8-port. I haven't tried it)
Theo
Err, I don't think you do:
VLAN != VPN.
VLAN is for running networks over shared physical infrastructure. They're separate, they run separate DHCP servers, one side cannot generate packets that route to the other no matter how it gets compromised.
VPN is for extending your network over the Internet. In a domestic situation you probably don't want that (though you may use it to connect to your employer).
VLAN is a layer 2 (Ethernet) thing, VPN is (mostly) a layer 3 (IP) thing (though some run at layer 2). VLANs won't run over the Internet unless you wrap them in a VPN (and it's generally a bad idea).
For instance, you ran a single ethernet cable under the patio to the shed. You want the shed to have access to the front door camera (that anyone could walk up to and hook into while you were on holiday) and the NAS containing your bank statements. You'd like those to be on two separate networks, but can't run another cable because it's under the concrete.
Or you ran a single cable up the stairs but you want to give the kids a separate network so you can separate their traffic from your home business in the spare bedroom. You want to be able to firewall your business traffic so whatever dodgy apps they're running won't get access to your work machines. Or perhaps you want first go at the DSL connection and want to restrict the bandwidth the kids have, or shut off their network after dinnertime while you can keep working.
This is all on top of standard MAC address switching that means links will only carry traffic relevant for them. That doesn't help you if a dodgy app generates traffic it's not intended to. VLANs do.
Theo
well exactly, nothing to do with ethernet ports and not needed domestically.
Since you can run as many networks as you like over a single piece of cable.
And if you really must use DHCP make sure the mac addresses are pre-allocated.
Oh, that's hysterical.
Oh yeah, one slip ane read 'VPN' wher VLAN is written and get a good laugh.
Now tell me once again, what possible reason could anyone ever have for installing a VLAN in a sonmestic situation, and what is meant oin the context of previous posts by 'Ethernet port'
Or is it simply a question of 'I am posting this irrelevant technical shit to baffle bra8ins and show off' ??
Stop digging, you are wrong.
No dennis, I am not wrong. There is a difference between security and traffic sharing
Read the section on how switches maintain MAC address tables so they only send particular packets destined for a particular target down a particular piece of cable. And the tree spanning algorithms that allow them to decide routes via other switches.
Anyone who has set up anything more than a basic network knows that a single switch can acccomodate dozens on independent IP networks, all coexisting happily and all mutually inaccessible if set up correctly, at the casual use level. Of course from a security point of view they are not always so separate - one network CAN break into another..but is that really an issue in a domestic situationb? Is your doorbell really going to change its IP address onto a 'different' network and hack into your server?
The whole POINT of a switch is that they are plug and play mac level ROUTERS.
Not repeaters.
Do you really want to keep digging? I probably know more about this stuff than you, it was my job to design networks with vlans in over ethernet, ATM, etc.
I had millions of pounds worth of kit from juniper, cisco, and others just to model networks on. They included:-
a play out suit provided by BBC technical services several reverse caches for the web servers loads of switches ATM switches DSLAMs CISCO VoIP System X exchange (14 of them IIRC) radio links
10G long haul links (never did get the soliton based one)You can continue to claim that you were correct but we know differently.
En el artículo , The Natural Philosopher escribió:
You say:
and you don't even know the difference between a VLAN and a VPN.
I'm glad I'm not one of your customers.
That won't necessarily be true. For several years, I tried just about every trick I could to get the data transfer rates between my NAS4Free box and my win2k desktop machine (connected via 2 or 3 metres worth of CAT5 in total using an 8 port Netgear GBit switch above 60MB/s (circa
500Mbps). Both machines were using 2010 vintage MoBos with built in GBit lan ports and dual core CPUs.The CrystalDiskMark results were interesting in that sustained large sequential transfer rates hovered around the 75MB/s mark for any of the four disks in the NAS box (mapped to local drive letters) almost without regard to any real world stop watch timed benchmarked improvements I was able to make.
The biggest improvement arose out of replacing the single core Semperon in the NAS box with a dual core Athlon 64 chip (I was already using a dual core 3.1GHz Phenom in the desktop PC) along with enabling the "Cool 'n' Quiet" feature and allowing N4F's excellent power management to work its magic (I'd initially disabled this feature and slightly underclocked and undervolted the Semperon to keep the power consumption down - it turned out that by allowing N4F's power management to function, I was able to achieve the same power saving - that is for the 99.9% of the time it was just idling).
Eventually, I raised the write speed (from desktop to NAS) to a dizzying
64MB/s and the read speed to a more modest 58MB/s (I never did figure why the write performance was so notably better than the write performance - just one of life's many mysteries I guess). I did see an improvement early on when using jumbo frame working until jumbo frames became deprecated to the point of no longer being supported by the FreeBSD devs not long after that last hardware upgrade back around 2010.Nearly two years ago now, I had an opportunity to benchmark using a customer's win7 desktop machine which had a decent specification. This was a real eye opener! The connection still used the same 8 port Gbit switch, only the cat5 segment to the workbench involved an extra 10 or 15 metres of cable. Testing using 10GB's worth of large media files (500GB to 2000GB in size) showed an average speed of circa 85MB/s each way using stopwatch timings. Even more revealing was the fact that before the disk ram caches filled up, the win7 PC reported 120 odd MB/s transfer rates for the 2 or 3 seconds it took before the disk transfer rates throttled it back to the 85 to 90 MB/s mark.
I didn't bother changing the CIFS/SMB protocol from type 1 (optimised for win2k / XP) to type 2 (optimised for win7 / 8). Seeing it reach so close to the theoretical max of 125MB/s before hitting the disk i/o limit of 85MB/s made such a test moot.
It turned out that the 64MB/s writing speed limit I'd been trying to improve upon for the previous 3 years or so had been nothing to do with the NAS box and everything to do with limitations in win2k's networking driver code. Believe me, I lost count of the number of 'tuning sessions' I'd tried to improve networking performance (it wasn't a hardware issue - the desktop hardware had an even higher spec than the NAS box).
Having tested with a decently specced win7 box, I could rest assured that the NAS4Free box was quite capable of maxing out the Gigabit link and not in need of any further network performance tuning. It's also worth remembering that the micro ATX SATA 2 MoBo (now some six years old) used in the NAS was nothing special (other than having a built in Gbit LAN port). Plus, it's also worth keeping in mind that CIFS/SMB performance in BSD blows Linux into the weeds (at least twice as fast compared to using a Linux based NAS box - and the same applies the other way round when Linux is running as a client machine).
That would reinforce what I was thinking regarding the poor i/o of a 'std' (onboard NIC) compared with one focused on efficient / low CPU involvement / server orientated NIC?
Transferring data is a very I/O based task and therefore shouldn't require much in the way of CPU. So, as long as the hardware involved was self sufficient (could use DMA etc) then it should offload much of the CPU load onto the Ethernet card itself (and why the sell such cards for 'servers' presumably)?
Network *and* any hard disk controllers may help.
Cheers, T i m
My laptop will get to 80MBytes/sec to the Synology ds215j.
That is despite the network being a gig nic on USB3. The CPU hovers in the low teens so the workload isn't high. The nic has never exceed 80% link capacity so I expect that's the limit. Now if I had a suitable wifi router it could do better in theory.
Writes should be quicker as the NAS can cache them and write them to disk in optimal order. It can't always know what to read ahead so it can't optimise the reads as easily. However frequently writes are slower and that's probably poor file system optimisation (they are probably still using ext3 rather than a more recent one).
Yes... Intel NICs are the gold standard, they're also less fussy about drivers because they do more in hardware. Realtek and Marvell NICs are cheaper and leave more to software.
You can often get Intel NICs for cheap (about a tenner) if you look at ex-server cards on ebay - some are branded HP, Dell or whatever but look for the ones with Intel chips.
However if the PC is recent it probably has an Intel NIC as part of the chipset, so the motherboard may already have that sorted.
Theo
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