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 an 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!

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    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.

      • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        Bonding is using multiple ports for increased throughput or redundancy. I have my server set to balance-alb which will share the load over both ports when transferring data between two or more computers. It will not increase the throughput to a single computer though.