Any PC Builders Out There?

Our office just switched over to the Surface Pro so that’s what I have. It’s nice, better than the garbage HP Ultrabooks we ran before that. They didn’t even come with SSDs and apparently the leases on the Surface cost the same as the HP leases did, which makes me wonder why we had HP at all since the Surface isn’t that new lol.

The laptop I need to upgrade I use just for imagery work. It’s a Lenovo legion 2nd gen with a 7 series Intel professor. I already has a 1 TB SATA SSD but I’d like to move the OS to its own 128 GB NVMe when I have time.

 

I'm interested in it as well, trying to decide if I want to simply have a NAS using FreeNAS or using unraid to make a home server system.

 

So the all in one units that ISP’s supply are composed of a modem, switch, and access point, correct?
If building your own home system could you not have a modem, switch, patch panel, and then standalone access points wired to the switch, such as the Ubiguity AP’s without having a “wireless router” in the system?

 

Yes you could, though I’d challenge that a modem, a switch, and a good mesh Wifi system makes more sense for a home than a multiple access point setup. Your all in one modem should have a pass through mode. If it does all you would need is a mesh wifi setup. Access points make more sense for larger spaces than a home, a good Wifi mesh system has more than enough bandwidth now to handle whatever you toss at it and can often self manage devices based on what speeds they need. Overall they’re simpler to implement than multiple access points.

 

^This. I considered running cable (such a pain), then tried a single Ubiquiti AP and didn't get the signal coverage I wanted. I could have added another AP, but that would mean running cable in the attic, and it was summer at the time. Went with the Ubiquiti Amplifi mesh system, it's been awesome and trouble-free. I still have the AP plus a router if anyone is looking, only used for a few days . . .

 

I have also heard the google mesh system is good. I have to use my verizon router on fios because it controls the tv signal somehow. Everything comes in ethernet, but it sends the signal back out through coax to the rest of the house and the cable boxes plug in coax. I could shut off the fios wifi and use a mesh system, but it covers my small house pretty well.

 

I run the Google Home Wifi Mesh and it’s near perfect. It’s not the fastest Wifi you can buy at only dual band

$360 AC1200 Auxbeam 12 Gang Switch Panel Bluetooth RGB AC-1200 with APP&Remote Control Toggle Momentary Pulsed Switch Pod Off Backlight for Truck Offroad UTV ATV Car Marine 12-24V Waterproof 2 Years Warranty

AC1200 speeds but no one in the house can tell and we’ve had zero issue with it. The Google app is awesome too, so changing your setup or checking up on your mesh is easy.

 

I have used freenas since2008 when it was called nas4free. 3 things happened that made me switch over to unraid.


1. Loss of data due to convoluted zfs file system. If you want to go this route you will want to use the type that has two or more hot spares as losing more than one drive at a time is common in my experience

2. Samba issues. Samba was fine for years and then all of a sudden transfer speeds were down to 1-2 mbps. This was going on for 6 months and they would not fix it.

3. OS gets corrupted and I tried using many different flash drives. Ended up using Samsung usb 3 flash drives that solved the problem but I did not trust it after this.


Enter unraid. 30 day trial and it is easy to set up. No confusion about adding/removing/replacing drives. Has cloud backup support thru plugins. Dockers work perfect especially the YouTube-dl Docker which allows you to download any you tube video. Since you tube is banning certain videos you can grab them while you can. You can start with one drive and add drives to increase the space and even swap them out one at a time to increase space. Things you can’t do with traditional raid. You can have a mirrored ssd setup for Dockers and virtual machines. To me unraid is like marrying VMware to a NAS. It’s the best of both worlds.


Sure it can be argued about its style of raid but so far I have zero issues and it is working 100% stable.

 

I just use a Linux box with lvm/luks/ext4 across multiple drives. I make backups often also.

I've been using ZFS on my laptop for some time. I haven't had it bite me yet, but I haven't tried using it across multiple drives.

 

Good to know, I was mainly asking because I was watching a video of a guy setting up his home system and had a router as well as Ubiquity access point, I was just curious is the router was redundant.
I had a Linksys EA6300 setup with my ISP in passthrough mode, it worked for about 4 hours and then I lost connection and I think we bricked it, reset doesn't work and all the activity lights on the back stay solid when plugged in.

In all reality though I just need one central AP and run 2 cables to the office and one to the living room TV, I also need to relocate the AIO from the ISP and storage for the DVR.
The biggest hurdles will be getting ethernet from upstairs to the office downstairs, as well as getting a cable run to the TV that's not visible.

I've heard good things about Ubiquity, I'll look into the mesh systems.

Good to know, I do like how UnRaid allows you to have Parity drives that you can add one at a time or use different capacity drives.

 

Quick question.

Did you turn up the db on the AP to max? Not sure how big your place is. I am using a single ac ap pro and with these settings and 5g I am getting really good results.

 

I use Ubiquiti Exclusively.

1. At home I have a USG, us8 60w, and an AC AP Pro
2. Work Wifi I have a USG 4 pro, 16 port POE Switch and 5 AP AC PRO's
3. Work Main (4) 48 port switches going to a usgX16 10gb backbone. all switches have sfp+ for 10 gig connections to the core. Dell San and vmware cluster all running at 10g. sonic-wall firewall.

 

I am looking for some 10Gb NICs for some computers at work. We already have a 24 port cisco 10Gb switch to use, and the building is wired with cat6. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

Well let’s see how this turns out, I had 2 systems that were given to me, one an old XP system that was a former neighbors ex-husbands PC that he had set up to DVR the home security system, and one was an old windows 7 single core E-machines system that my parents used to pay their bills before my mom get her MacBook.

The XP system had IDE drives in it so I’m gonna pull the MoBo from the Emachines system and use it in that chassis (I like the form factor better) and I think I have some spare HDD’s laying around so I can put FreeNAS on it to try it (I have my external HDD’s to keep redundant backups on) and see if a NAS/home server is something I will use.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to get it connected right away, I’m trying to decide if I want to move the router and I have to run some Ethernet cables.

 

Got the system together, it boots windows 7 64 bit so I’m working on wiping 2 drives to use for storage, one little snag though, I only have 3 GB ram and it’s DDR2, I have other ram laying around but it’s only DDR or DDR3 so I’m trying to decide if I want to try it on 3GB or go ahead and buy a 4GB stick to bump the system to 6GB.

I also need to look into the hot swap SATA bays for the front of the case, I have one but no tray so I cannot currently hot swap HDD’s.

 

I don't think I messed with the xmit power. Our place is something like 3700 sq feet, with only like 600 of that on the upper floor, so it's kind of spread out. I also wanted to get a decent signal out back and in the garage. I used an app to test signal strength across the house, and it was slightly worse than the Netgear X8 I was replacing. Workable, but not great. For me, spreading that signal out with a mesh system was best to get the coverage I wanted, it was just asking too much of a single AP.

 

Mesh FTW. Seriously though in my house it’s been a god send. I had an Asus RT-66U with its power maxed out in the middle of my house and there were still dead spots all over the place. Now we even have Wifi in the backyard.

 

Got FreeNAS to boot finally, ended up switching the HDD to my I5 system with 16Gb Ram. I may be able to swap it back to the pentium now, it’s configured for the most part, got a 1TB drive configured in it and got a pool set up but now I don’t know how to transfer in files.
Gonna do some more research and play around with it to see what I come up with.