Experimenting with network topology and throughput.

[agent_kith]

Not entirely sure what is happening, just do not feel that engaged with the music with this new setup now. The music is boring and lifeless...

Man, I should really keep this thread up to date! It's been > a year since the last update. For historical reasons, the solution to fix the above "boring" sound is to ground the case of this tiny PC. So all I did is to attach a thin lean wire. Tap one end to this router, and the other end to my development machine (which is grounded). Problem solved.

Second tweak that works is for me to start using Jumbo Frames. See this  blog article when I turned off Jumbo Frames and found the music was perceptally worse. Long story short the network card I was using on my NAS is causing random reboots. This isn't completely fixed yet, I'll need to buy a new NIC to fix this permanently.

Anyhoo the routing software running on this tiny PC is something called pfSense. Over the year I have experimented with various ways of connecting things up (see here for a quick review). And right now I've finalised on the L3 topology. For a long time this setup is running fine. Then I stupidly tried to change a setting on the router. I can't remember what that was but it brought down the whole network. Luckily pfSense has this great feature - undo configuration change. So all I need to do is to roll-back to a previous configuration.
 

Or so I thought! Everything seems to work, but for some stupid reason Jumbo frames no longer cross VLANs (sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't).... Honestly NFI what the problem could be. I am pretty sure if I factory reset the settings back to default, and re-apply the configuration everything will work as before. But I really shouldn't need to do that! All these little problems I constantly get with pfSense, this is the last straw!

So come next year, I'm gonna ditch pfSense and go with Untangle. Good thing is all I need to do is to swap out the HDD to install Untangle. And I can always swap the old pfSense HDD back to get the old system back.

So many things to do, so little time .