Remodelling the local network

This article was ported over from the old blog and will soon receive a follow-up

My current network setup is a bit of a mess, so I thought I'd share a little of what I have running right now and how I want to reconfigure all of this to make it a little more usefull for a wide array of tasks. As an aside: since I am currently not living on my own I have to be somewhat mindful of not disturbing the network for anybody else - though in this case that shoudl not be an issue.

My Setup

I am right now fielding a wide collection of different hardware:

• On a 16-Port TP-Link Switch
• Whitebox Workstation (Xeon E3-1230 V3, 16gb RAM)
• Supermicro 1U Server with an Intel Atom CPU
• HP DL380 G6 (Two E5-Somethingrather, 72gb RAM)
• Raspberry Pi 3 for testing purposes

On a Linksys 8-Port Switch in the basement

• HP Microserver G9 with Freenas
• Raspberry Pi 3 with PiHole

The stuff in the basement is open to everyone in the house and is not something I want to make any changes to. The Raspberry Pi there provides reliable DHCP and DNS for everybode and the storage is also a well proven and reliable system. While I'd like to put some additional RAM into the microserver I'd say I'm ok on that front for now. What needs to change is the stuff around my desk - my workstation/gaming-system, the rest has proven somewhat impractical.

Proposed changes

The issues with the current setup are a) that it's all rackmounted gear (and I dont have a rack) and b) that it's rather more on the loud side for stuff thats in a room where people are living and working. While I might be able to move the DL380 in the basement (and it really is a nice system that I like a lot) doing that would be quite the hassle. What it comes down to is, that I need less power then this mashine offers but I need it in a package that allows me to run the system 24/7. Also the small 1U system is not useful right now since its original purpose never materialized, so this one is going to ebay. This leaves me with the switch as the sole rackmountable-formfactor component - and while it's working great I'd rather have something web-managed. So, yeah: ebay once more ...
After some back and forth I remebered this article https://tinkertry.com/supermicro-superserver-sys-e200-8d-and-sys-e300-pictures and the videos that came with it as a possible way to solve my server-issues. While the e300 is a bit more expensive that a used DL380, it might well be a mashine that could stick with me for quite a long time. Also some of the price would be offset be pushing things to ebay. I might start a little smaller with the ram and just up this later, after all we are not talking about production-systems with a lot of users - so that bit of downtime someday won't be a problem. Also storage won't be an issue, after all it's only meant to run a hypervisor and mount storage via NFS or iSCSI - so a small SSD or something like that may well be ok for now.
Of course that leaves the networking part: after reading a lot of good things about them I thought I'd give Ubuquity a try with one of their 8-port UniFi switches. 8 ports will be more then enough and this is a nice way of having a look at their products.
So there you have it: another project to keep reporting on. While we are at it, I also want to bring the blog bag over from ghost to kirby - yeah, I need 48h days ....