Network Review 2025
Current server rack layout and physical configuration, in all its glory.
It’s been a while since I did a network review blog post, in fact it’s been well over a year. A few things have changed as they continually do, so I’ll cover the recent changes as well as overall performance.
Upgrades
The upgrades came in two forms - software and hardware. We’ll start with the main software upgrades.
Ubuntu 24.04. All of the production servers were updated to the latest Ubuntu LTS, and this was covered in detail in a recent blog post. It was not without its issues, nothing major, just rather time consuming.
Debian 12. The internal Home Assistant server was on Debian 11, and I performed the upgrade to 12, covered here. At the time, I found the number of commands to be rather tedious but in general since there were little to no problems compared to the Ubuntu upgrades that happened later, again Debian is growing on me.
Wireguard. For remote VPN access, Wireguard was set up to replace the Cloudflare tunnel. I detailed the process here, it is pretty nice.
And here are the main hardware upgrades.
Switch. I had one UniFi USW 24 PoE switch in the rack, but I opted to purchase a second. There was still room in the first switch, however cable management was becoming a bit of an issue, plus this sets things up better for future planned expansion on the home network anyway.
NAS. I replaced the Synology 1522+ with a brand new UniFi UNAS. There were two reasons for this - one I’ll cover in the performance section below, and the other was I wanted to use more drives but due to performance issues was not keen on getting the Synology expansion unit. The hard drives themselves were originally Xmas gifts from over a year ago, as a lot of non-techie family and friends would ask me what I wanted so I mentioned a somewhat affordable 4TB drive with the idea of populating a NAS with them, and everyone got them for me.
Fiber. Between the server rack switches and the new UNAS, I updated it to use fiber optic cables, in an effort to create a kind of high-speed backbone in the rack itself. No idea if I will ever need this, but I thought I’d go ahead and set it up.
Performance
In general, there have only been a few performance issues, some hardware, some software, but none of them more than an annoyance or something that is relatively easily corrected.
Uptime. There have been no unplanned outages related to the public servers themselves. The internal server Hivemind - the Home Assistant server - is the sole server running Debian and it is the only server that has experienced occasional downtime. The Hivemind downtime is sometimes at the Home Assistant level in that the main service Hivemind serves up internally is Home Assistant, but there have been a number of incidents involving the Debian operating system itself. Most of the time a reboot fixed things, although a couple of times an automatic update required a bit of forcing. Ubuntu has not had this issue. For context, all of the servers in the rack are System76 Meerkats, so there are no real hardware differences. The only Internet downtime that has happened is a result of the provider AT&T and often the modem itself, however the vast majority of these outages are corrected automatically via monitoring through the UniFi PDU which power cycles the modem in the event of an outage.
NAS. It’s been hit and miss with the Synology 1522+ and since it was fairly new I did follow up with reporting of issues. Although they could not find a problem with the device (and even warranty-replaced it once) it still has had problems. Basically, Synology blamed me for things like heat and network connectivity, which was not the case. This was one of the main reasons why I opted to get rid of the Synology and go for UniFi’s UNAS. With the reliability issues, the various apps that Synology offers up were never seriously used, and while the UNAS is a brand new product offering and basically only offers up SMB storage, I can use this as raw storage for running something like Jellyfin on another server anyway.
Good things. The System76 Meerkats have been rock solid. Over the years I’ve had better luck with Intel CPUs and if given a choice will pick them time and time again. This seems to have helped as far as stability goes. The same goes for the UniFi gear. I have a lot of it, and have had no problems with any of the hardware at all. As the software running on them has been quite stable as far as uptime goes, I’ve even opted for everything running on Early Access so I always have the latest and greatest. The only problems I’ve had have been new features not working properly or even UI issues (typically fixed the next release), nothing that has impacted uptime. I don’t recommend this for everyone of course, but I’ve had a good experience and it works for me.
The Future
Originally my desk setup was in the office (a former bedroom) but I had moved a lot of equipment out of there, mainly so I could have Zoom calls and my wife could still stream video content (the sole television is in the office). I was originally working from the tiny area in the server room, but as that became more cluttered with equipment, I eventually set up shop in the living room at the dining room table. After my wife passed, I never moved back into the office and it is in dire need of a makeover anyway, as the corner unit desk was considered pristine maybe 20 years ago. I’d like to simply redo everything. This will definitely impact the overall setup and is in part why I adjusted things in the server rack.
I’m also expecting an upgrade to the solar setup which will impact energy monitoring, hence another part of the server rack adjustments. That part could end up being quite interesting. Or not. We’ll see!
As always, I’ll keep documenting changes - mainly so I have a written record of what I did. Amazing how often I have a problem or challenge of some sort, and I ask myself “what did I do the last time?” only to refer back to one of my old blog posts for the answer. Hopefully a few of you out there are entertained with this nerd tech stuff as well.