I’m in the process of designing a home server and am curious how many ethernet ports are required at minimum and how many people recommend. The single board computer (SBC) I plan to use has two built in and has a pcie slot to add four more if necessary. If I don’t need the four extra I’d like to use the pcie slot for a pcie Coral Edge TPU (preferred over the USB variant but still and option).
I expect to plan to use the server to connect to my home network so any device on the network via WiFi can access NextCloud. Besides that I want to use Frigate in another container for home video surveillance. I don’t know if I can or want to yet also add a Plex or Jellyfin instance to then connect to my TV or use a separate SBC for that.
What are your thoughts? I’m new to all of these things and just don’t want to waste money on the wrong hardware. Thanks!
Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
1 is required at minimum, there is no maximum
I’m so confused by your question.
sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch 1 year ago
What scenerio would require multiple Ethernet ports? Is two or even one sufficient for what I want to do?
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Adding to thejevans’ answer, if you were running a network analysis tool like Snort, it would be easier if you had multiple ports.
MajinBlayze@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Are you confusing “ports” with “interfaces”? I can see that happening since we do colloquially refer to both as ports depending on context.
Each service will bind to it’s own “port” which is tied up by that service. However each interface (the external physical connection) supports like 65,000 software ports.
Do in practice, no, you don’t usually need more than one physical network connection.
Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Backup internet
Two (or more) seperate networks that need access to the same server. This is done so is network A is down, network B can still access the server.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I have two ports bonded on my server to get more speed, but I could get by with a single port just fine.
If you need to connect to multiple networks you can use VLANs and a single ethernet port if you want to.