brwainer

I’m really trying to understand how they can sell off Instant On considering the hardware is just the low end Aruba APs and switches. I know its a specific SKU and firmware but its still just normal Aruba under the hood.

Look at Lawrence Systems recent videos (everything in the last three months) about Proxmox and Proxmox Backup Server - especially the ones about hardening, best practices, and how to set up PBS with minimal permissions and a “Pull” setup so that an attack on the primary server can’t affect your backups. I believe there will be some more Proxmox content from them too. They also have their own forum where you may get some other good responses to your questions.

OK so sounds like you understand routing fairly well…. But I’m not seeing a place whether you’re bottlenecked by an underperforming router that a L3 switch will improve things. But there is also always the learning aspect, that’s what a lab is for. Anyway, as I said before at your budget there aren’t any good options so you’ll have to look at the used market. I don’t know what brands are going to be readily available in the UK, but there’s always Cisco. For something Cisco-Like you could try to find a Dell S4xxx switch like an S4112 or S4128. The homelab scene values Ruckus/Brocade ICX switches, they’re easy to enable L3 on without paying the license fee if the one you get didn’t have it, but they have very different CLI which could be good or bad depending on what you want to focus on learning. HPE/Aruba is another big brand, for them I’d look for a 2930F as a starting point - Aruba is also a rather different CLI but most people pick it up faster than ICX.

Having a L3 switch won’t speed things up unless A) the traffic is going between different VLANs/subnets, and B) the router you have now can’t route (and do whatever else is configured like traffic inspections) at full speed. If you’re already getting 1Gbps speeds (or really anything greater than 850Mbps) then to get faster you need to upgrade your lab, server, and switch to 2.5Gb, 5Gb, or 10Gb. What does your routing topology look like, what router do you have now, and what speeds are you getting? Is your dedicated server and lab in the same building?

For that price you're either looking at completely untrustworthy randomly named brands, or a Mikrotik which will technically have L3 features but doesn't do L3 at line rate, or buying used. What are you intending to set up with a L3 switch?

That’s not how these scams work. They want people to panic about the renewal/purvhase they didn’t make and call them to cancel/refund, at which point the “representative” will happily handle that for you but needs you to do something, goal could be installing persistant remote control onto your PC, stealing banking information, or a number of other things.

If all the networks are being broadcast from the same APs then this won’t really make a difference. If there’s no 5GHz IoT clients then you’re just saving one beacon packet. Wouldn’t change the channel usage.

Well, when I google "set up bridge on Windows 10" I get a lot of guides for it that you could follow.... my intention was to give you a nugget of information (the fact that you can set up a bridge on Windows 10 to do what you want) and you'd take the initiative of researching the topic from there.... Anyway, here's one guide: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-set-and-manage-network-bridge-connection-windows-10 You would select the four ports, where it says to select two ports.

You can keep Windows 10 and just set up a Bridge and put the 4x2.5Gb ports in it. That’s the same as you’d be doing with OpenWRT. Important note to understand: a bridge and a switch serve the same purpose, they transfer packets between ports based on destination MAC or they copy broadcast packets to all ports. The difference is a switch has dedicated hardware (a Switch Chip or Switch ASIC) to perform this task, while a Bridge is functioning purely in software and all traffic has to pass through the CPU. A 4 port NIC card never has switch chip hardware on it so you can only use a Bridge configuration.

If you have acceptable coverage without 2.4GHz then I wouldn’t enable it, it doesn’t provide sufficient extra bandwidth to be worth it (if MLO is even working that way) and may cause devices to delay roaming to the other AP because they still have a 2.4GHz signal.

This error isn’t saying there is specifically something wrong the drive except that it couldn’t get any results from the SMART system. This can happen if you replace a drive and the new drive gets assigned the same letter as the original one, smartctl uses the disk address to request data but gets back the wrong serial/identifier so therefore it throws away the results. If you didn’t replace the drive then it could be failing just for SMART results. Either way I would first double check your backups are running and recent, and then reboot the server.

Standards are only about interoperability. If the packets on the wire are correct and VLANs are kept separated then the rest of the implementation is up to the vendor. What differences are you seeing? A textbook explanation of VLANs doesn’t really explain to me the “variations in how untagged ingress frames are processed internally” you see.

I’m not interested enough to figure out myself, but I’m curious whether this company does legitimate research and development, or is a patent troll.

I have to correct myself, there does appear to be local control for eWeLink devices now, if they are running a firmware version >2.7. I just swapped my integration from "auto" to "local only" and my one Sonoff device still works in HomeAssistant, so cool! Sonoff devices are supported via adding the "Sonoff LAN" package via HACS, and the release notes for that are here: https://github.com/AlexxIT/SonoffLAN Otherwise, my best recommendation is to look for the device/manufacturer in here, and look for the "IoT Class" for Local vs Cloud: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ (note this page may filter itself to "featured" when you open it, select "All" in the upper left). You can install Home Assistant and do as much setup as you want without interfering with your Alexa setup - just don't confuse yourself by having automations in more than one system!

While HomeAssistant itself is something you would run locally, whether control over specific smart devices happens locally or via the cloud depends on whether the vendor has/allows local access. Sonoff devices do not have local control, their devices all go through the eWeLink app which is cloud reliant. This means that if the internet or the hosting provider of eWeLink is down it won’t matter whether your routines are in Alexa or HomeAssistant. There are many Sonoff alternatives that can work locally, or many Sonoff devices can be flashed with alternative firmware like ESPHome that are local-only, but either way means putting some time and potentially some money into getting it working. The end result can be something that has no outside dependencies and will keep running as long as and exactly how you want it to.