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!
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.
What is port bonding exactly? Extra throughput by using two ports from the same ISP?
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.
Thank you. I don’t think I have a good need for this feature so that’ll save me a port.