azl

Just a couple thoughts (I have a mix of 2.5Gb and 10Gb):

• Mikrotik switches are a nice alternative to Unifi. Much less lipstick on the UI but reliable and fairly priced.

• If possible, you’ll probably want to use your own router rather than the all-in-one provided by the ISP. In my case, the router provided to me (Eero brand) did not even have a port fast enough for my service, and would have been an instant bottleneck.

• Options for 10Gb-capable PCIe adapters (what you might put in your server or desktops) are more limited (at least they were when I transitioned a couple of years ago). Intel-based network adapters seem to require less effort to get working (driver-wise) vs. some of the other 10Gb / SFP+ capable adapters.

Finally, you are correct: nobody needs an 8Gb internet connection. Aside from well-seeded torrent file transfers, you will never reach that limit (and probably still never). And, you’ll need an adequate storage backend to write that fast.

You would need to run the LLM on the system that has the GPU (your main PC). The front-end (typically a WebUI) could run in a docker container and make API calls to your LLM system. Unfortunately that requires the model to always be loaded in the VRAM on your main PC, severely reducing what you can do with that computer, GPU-wise.

Saying files are encrypted when it is not true is an issue, regardless of who owns the host box. Even for a small instance that is private family or friends.

Yes, this is totally possible and I did it for a couple of years with OPNsense. I actually had an OPNsense box and a pfSense box both on Hyper-V. I could toggle between them easily and it worked well. There are CPU considerations which depend on your traffic load. Security is not an issue as long as you have the network interface assignments correct and have not accidentally attached the WAN interface to any other guest VM’s.

Unfortunately, when I upgraded to 1Gb/s (now 2Gb/s) on the WAN, the VM could not keep up. No amount of tuning in the Hyper-V host (dual Xeon 3GHz) or the VM could resolve the poor throughput. I assume it came down to the 10Gb NICs and their drivers, or the Hyper-V virtual switch subsystem. Depending on what hardware offload and other tuning settings I tried, I would get perfect throughput one way, but terrible performance in the other direction, or some compromise in between on either side. There was a lot of iperf3 testing involved. I don’t blame OPNsense/pfSense – these issues impacted any 10Gb links attached to VM’s.

Ultimately, I eliminated the virtual router and ended up where you are, with a baremetal pfSense on a much less powerful device (Intel Atom-based). I’m still not happy with it – getting a full 2Gb/s up and down is hard.

Aside from performance, one of the other reasons for moving the firewall back to a dedicated unit was that I wanted to isolate it from any issues that might impact the host. The firewall is such a core component of my network, and I didn’t like it going offline when I needed to reboot the server.

There are some SRV and other records which you add for the AD-provided services (kerberos, gc, ldap). This allows your Windows clients to find the domain controllers for authentication via your non-Windows DNS. I think I might have followed a Microsoft or other article when doing the initial setup, but once getting those items in place I haven’t had many issues.

I do. 4 or 5 users and several computers plus virtual server members. I still use Linux for DNS which works surprisingly well after the initial setup.

I did it half for practice and half for fun, but having the authentication backend makes it good enough to keep around.

Just want to clarify - after looking at Porkbun’s DNS offerings, it does not appear they do DDNS either. Is that correct? So they are not any better than SquareSpace for that service. Porkbun does have an API interface.

It looks like Namecheap has DDNS support (at least I get valid-looking results when I search for that on their website).

I haven’t changed registrars in 10+ years. I am in the same boat re. Google -> SquareSpace. Is DDNS deprecated in favor of API’s across the board? It looks more complicated to set up.

There will always be a free internet. It just may not be the one currently dominated by corporate datacenters.