Remote over LAN - wiring the house

N7CXI

We'll be moving across town to a new QTH in the next couple of months and it occurred to me that there would be an opportunity to pre-wire for the eventual 6000-series rig. 

To get down to it my downstairs shack, upstairs office and several other rooms will share a common GigE network. All well and good for running the radio remotely, but since I only have one "inside" subnet planned so far and there will be lots of high-bandwidth traffic on it, I'm wondering what a good strategy might be? If SmartSDR 1.4 uses a fixed port range for remote operation I could get away with setting QOS priority on those ports. If not, I'm thinking I might have to create VLAN's and assign priority to the one carrying the radio traffic.

Anyone have this worked out in their head yet? Worrying about traffic on a GigE network might sound strange, but its business as usual around here. 

TIA,
Jim N7CXI

K6OZY

Define "high-bandwidth"?  As long as everything in the home is on gigabit switches and not old 100mbit hubs, you shouldn't need any QoS inside your home.   1000Mbps gets you about 95 megabytes per second of transfer rate both directions on a GigE port.     If you are cascading switches using a line topology, you could potentially saturate a port if you were doing file copies from a home NAS array from multiple computers spread across edge switches at once.   To prevent this situation, design your network with star topology.  



 Have all of your high-bandwidth devices directly connected to the center switch and tether lower-use, upstream switches to other places in the house for things like Netflix, Xbox, AppleTV, etc.   I haven't seen my 6700 consume more than 4-5MB/sec with all DAX and DAXIQ channels in use.   The future compressed audio stream will likely be low bandwidth when compared to the currently uncompressed DAX streams.

PS, do not use ring, mesh, or fully connected topologies on home switches.    You do not increase bandwidth by connecting switches together with multiple ports unless they are more advanced devices.   You would need to do things like Ethernet Bonding or Teaming and enable STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) to increase the actual bandwidth between switches.   When you connect devices together that aren't capable of doing that, you create a situation called "Spanning Tree Loop", where switches don't know the right port to take since there are many paths available of equal quality, and this will ultimately hurt the network.

N7CXI

Well - by "high bandwidth" I was talking about a cluster of SQL servers, not NetFlix. ;-)
I wondered if I could get someone to spill on whether SmartSDR would use a reasonably small fixed port range - if so, I could use QOS. My switches are smart enough to do VLAN's, but that implies work on my part and possible unintended consequences later.

In truth, I shouldn't be so lazy/cheap and should physically separate my work sandbox and "home use" networks. It's just convenient to have everything available from everywhere, with no configuration required.

Thanks,
Jim N7CXI

K6OZY

A cluster of SQL servers should only be syncing translogs between them for failover use.   Don't confuse high bandwidth with high transactions (Ack/IOPs).  I doubt you are saturating GigE between a SQL cluster and a client computer in your home.    If you are doing a ton of SQL queries in the home, again just keep that isolated onto a single switch and you should be fine.    Switches don't broadcast packets to adjacent switches unless there is a need.   This would keep your SQL traffic isolated enough honestly.

VLAN sandboxing would not increase total bandwidth, only isolate the traffic from other computers.   VLANs will isolate broadcast and multicast traffic, but again, that should be near zero in your home, even with your setup.   Then you would have to use two different IP Subnets and setup a router somewhere, which seems way more of a PITA honestly.

I like talking network.  I'm a CCIE and do a ton of high bandwidth network optimization at eBay.  

N7CXI

Thanks for the replies.
It isn't practical to isolate the cluster and clients (between 2 and LOTS)  to a single switch, but I get what you mean. It was probably a poor idea to bring the whole mess up here anyway; I was hoping to prod a response on the port range. I'll just spring for one more switch and it will all work.

Jim N7CXI

Asher - K0AU

Something to consider if you're pre-wiring.  Pull a couple strands of multimode fiber to the shack.  No worries about RF or lightning in the house LAN.  It's probably overkill, but it's cheap if you're pulling wire anyway.  No more than $1/foot for the fiber and $50 for GigE PMCs. 

K6OZY

I do not know the port range information, so Flex would have to chime in there.  You could inspect the open ports locally by using typing "netstat -n" and look for the IP address of your Flex radio on the list while SmartSDR is in use.   You could also install WireShark and capture the chatter on your NIC as well filtering the radio's IP address too.

N7CXI

Hmm... I'm assuming the streaming audio interface hasn't been implemented yet in a released version of SmartSDR, and since I don't have a radio yet anyway, it's moot. ;-)

Good ideas in general, though. I have WireShark and will use it if I still need to when it comes time to outfit the shack. I sold my 5000A and a lot of other gear as part of a "clean sweep" in preparation for the new shack. The QTH is only 1 acre, though - that's going to be more of a challenge than the network stuff.  :-)

Thanks,
Jim N7CXI

N7CXI

I'm tempted... Most of my switches are 4-5 years old, so if I weren't so cheap that would be a no-brainer. 
If I knew for sure that cheap switches from RouterBoard (for example) would be relatively RFI-free and reliable I'd buy some with SFP's and do exactly that.

Anyone that stayed awake through this thread using RouterBoard switches?

Thanks,
Jim N7CXI

N7CXI

And I just now see that I should be commenting in the "Comment" box instead of a new reply each time.  Sheesh. Who me? Learn software? ;-)

K6OZY

Congrats on the radio!  You will love it.     The streaming audio is not present in any of the public releases yet.  

I could only wish for a 1 acre QTH.  Mine is a small 1/3 acre.  I suffer with an HOA but have had good performance with a sloper 66' Carolina Windom.   It's not too bad on voice with an amp.  On CW, it's very good.   I also have use an PixelTech "Where's Waldo" RF-Pro 1B loop RX only antenna to help knock down local QRM.   When diversity RX becomes live, I'm hoping it will help quite a bit more!

Stan VA7NF

A very good use for fiber is to eliminate much EMI from some switches.  Cisco put a lot of common mode RF on the wiring and STP shield where NetGear doesn't.  Many switches will take 2 fiber connections; one to the shack (see lightning above) and another to one of your more remote locations.