Sunday Live Q&A: Firewall, VLAN, VPN, Homelab, And Other Tech Topics

7 thoughts on “Sunday Live Q&A: Firewall, VLAN, VPN, Homelab, And Other Tech Topics”

• How many servers do I need? Well like Tom I stated an IT business!!
  … now I need a motorcycle business 😅

• Great discussions. I still love how you pronounce Protectli, "Protect-TELLY." Love mine, even though mine is the older FW4A without CoreBoot.

• Hi Tom, love the show from Africa. Just a quick question would you use pfsense for medical, law practices and emergency departments of hospitals or will you rather use FW like Sophos, Fortigate…?

• If we're being pedantic, then copper's speed is zero because conductors are opaque to EM signals. The copper is just there for mechanical support and the EM field only interacts with the silver plating. Signal velocity depends more on the dielectric. The Arista article referenced in your video about DAC/fiber latency doesn't even define the cables used, only that one of the fiber types is OM1 and the DACs are twinax. Foam-insulated twinax and conventional fiber velocity factors overlap so another test could produce the opposite result. The same article even says that hollow-core fibers should be much faster. Arista also mistakenly chooses different reference planes for the different media so the latencies aren't directly comparable

• "Home Assistant if you want your family to by annoyed that they can't turn the ligths on when the server is down" – let me say something here:
  1- exactly the same argument for:
  – "wireless connection when it goes down"
  – "anything powered from mains when you have no battery backup"
  – "anything depending on anything else i.e. ISP"
  2- HA is not a magic thingi – you need to set it up properly. Example:
  – almost all switches (that you can mount in the wall switch box) have possibility to be use BOTH: remotely (Home Assistant) AND locally (switch on the wall) controlled
  – everything in my house what is connected to the remote (HA in this case) has local "backup solution" – heating, etc – it is a matter of proper design and execution

  With regards to sensors/switches: wifi or Zigbee/Zwave – hmm, that depends:
  – zigbee/zwave are less reliable than wifi
  – but wifi require separated AP and ssid – otherwise your laptops will have very low speed, I have around 150+ IoT devices on wifi and if I connect my laptop to that SSID my internet is 2Mbps
  – and IoT devices don't need internet connection (if you buy the ones that can be locally controlled) so it is safer to block IoT VLAN rather than Zigbee/Zwave from accessing internet

  so in conclusion: the statement was for sure from someone who has little idea about Smart Home, design and execution.
  Surprised I am however, that Tom said… "yeaaaa, that is that thing" 😉

• question about xcp-ng networked storage. i watched your series on xcp-ng i wanted to know what network storage you might suggest. i am currently running hardware raid 10 on 4 x 3 tb sas drives. was a nfs share via rocky 9 vm machine on an xcp-ng host. this machine is not heafty power machine the machine to run apps etc is a seperate host machine different pool. a friend suggest ceph . does xcp-ng support ceph, gluster etc do you recommend version ? for homelab

• Hi Lawrence, I have a question that I could not ask on the live chat and the question is the following: ​Have you ever had the need to buy pf2ad to join pfSense to a Windows Server's Active Directory? …. Thanks a lot for your awesome channel!

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