On Sun, 28 Nov 2021 07:20:14 -0600
o1bigtenor via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> Greetings
>
> In anticipation of a fiber optical connection (moving from a wireless) I
> have been planning out and purchasing some bits of hardware. Am finding
> that networking is, at least sure seems to be, another black hole for time
> and effort.
>
> TL;DR (skip to last paragraphs for the question(s))
>
> At present this is a soho office kind of installation but that will slowly
> be morphing into something that is at least somewhat larger. There are a
> number of input sensor locations being worked on some of which would be
> generating, initially at least, up to 15 data streams sampled possibly
> every second (some maybe more often - - - decisions aren't all done as yet)
> so there will be a fair amount of data running around on my network which
> I'm trying to keep largely a wired affair.
>
> At this point I'm working on the three entry bits of hardware (and their
> software) - - - the router, hardware firewall, and the managed switch. The
> initial hockup on the fiber system is going to be at 250 Mbps sysmetric.
>
> For the router I'm planning on using OpenWRT running on a Nanopi r4s which
> according to the folks over on openwrt capable of even very close to full
> Gbps speeds (IIRC tested to some 918 Mbps) which would give some headroom
> for future increases although I don't see a need for the foreseeable
> future.
>
> For the switch I have found myself a XyZel 1900-48 that I'm working on
> getting OpenWRT on. This ability to run a managed switch on OpenWRT is
> somewhat new but its open source and I'm not tied (I don't think) to
> OpenWRT - - - - except I don't know any other real alternative - - - so
> that's not a difficult solution either. I don't 'need' 48 ports but I have
> 16 at present on a hub and its almost full and that's for stuff only here
> in the orifice (sic!). I also want the capabilities of forcing streaming
> services and wireless communications to not collect any more data from any
> other part of the network (using VLANs) as is possible.
>
> Then lastly to the hardware firewall.
> I've been looking at pfsense and opnsense. Both are ipv6 possible although
> both are mostly focused on ipv4 at the present. IPfire seems to have gotten
> itself into a holding pattern and is not continuing work toward ipv6
> functionality. Any one of these options are producing headaches when I'm
> trying to figure out how to configure them - - - nothing installed at
> present, just researching so far.
>
> So - - - - questions - - - -
> 1. is my splitting the network system into the three parts a good idea or
> should I truncate parts 1 and 2 into the router? If you would please give
> reasons - - - please?

Hi,

If you want to have reliability splitting is good, if the router breaks
you still have a working firewall and switch and so on.
If you want also some redundancy you should think of buying
two of everything:

2 routers
2 firewalls
2 switches (2 x24 rather than 1x48 ports)

I personally prefer x86 hardware for this kind of things
when I see that little boxes like the Nanopi R4S they make me
think about toys. In my case sadly I'm tied to adsl over pots
so for the modem I still need to use this little plastic blackboxes.
In your case I would swap the nanopi for a nice mini-itx board
with intel nics, a sfx/flex psu (or pico psu), 4-8 gb of ram and a well
ventilated case (with low noise Noctua fans).

> 2. are there any good sources for information on and about networking?
>      debian has moved to nftables from iptables  - - - is devuan doing
> similar?

I think so.

>      Where does one find information to enable a firewall that works yet
> isn't stupid?

I use arno-iptables-firewall It is easy to create a basic setup for your network,
reliable, comes with good defaults and can easily be tweaked (for port-forwarding,
vpns, geoip filtering and so on, don't know about vlans as don't use them yet).

> (I've wondered about having some kind of easy 'switch' that when users left
> their systems that the system wouldn't be calling home in the overnight at
> least a la ms googly. Dunno if that's 'simple' or not - - - so much to
> learn and so little time to do it all in!)
>
> TIA

Ciao,
Tito