Comment on choosing a NIC for OPNsense
non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 day agoJust go get any of the enterprise parts from a couple years ago. Mellanox, lucent, qlogic, hpe, these are all fairly well supported by freebsd.
I would avoid Broadcom and Realtek, they are better supported today, but performance is an issue.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
enterprise wont likely support 2.5gig which is what I’m targeting for this build. 10 gig is too expensive and power hungry for my tastes but 2.5 or 5 should be fine.
KaninchenSpeed@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
10 gig sfp+ isnt that expensive or power hungry anymore. You can get a new switch for ~100$ now. A complete 2.5 gig network is probably more expensive as you can’t really get used nics.
KaninchenSpeed@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
10 gig sfp+ isnt that expensive or power hungry anymore. You can get a new switch for ~100$ now. A complete 2.5 gig network is probably more expensive as you can’t really get used nics.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I need VLANs and I’m planning some PoE+ stuff too, meaning higher costs though now that I think about it those are probably more common in 10Gig switches anyway. But that still means they are consuming more power, making more heat, making more nose from fans…
non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
VLANs don’t really enter into the equation here. They are layer 2 and will be important for switch choice, but not for NICs.
Poe does add some complexity, so sfp+ will no longer be a good category for this. You will essentially be reduced to a handful of models for 2.5 or 5g without specs.
You might be at the point in your planning where you need to evaluate why you need 2.5g in the first place. There are very few use cases for 2.5g in the home as it is.
KaninchenSpeed@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
You can take a look at mikrotik, their switches are really cheap and some of them are even layer 3, but I don’t know about their availability in the US.
I don’t have one yet, but their 4 port 100 gig switch looks verry tempting.