Thanks again for commenting! I haven't bought anything just yet, in fact with the current situation I'll be keeping it minimal to start with, but this is my intention. As I'm digging and building the office, I thought while I'm doing it, I might as well put in decent stuff - because once it's done, I really don't want to dig it up again! Mind you, underground cables will be in conduit, so I can pull through new cables if needed.Right. Why not
Very good point, I actually watched a video the other day of a tech wizz that was 'lending' his neighbour (parents) his internet connection via an underground CAT cable. He also used their house for an off-site backup. Turned out not to be too good as a tree in between the properties was struck by lightening and grounded onto the network cable and killed a lot of attached gear.The telco copper, is the lightning suppression in the house, and you're just extending this out to another building? If so, make sure it is properly protected in the other building as well.
Running ethernet copper back is not recommended.
My big question, I guess, is why do this? Put the router in the house, and just run 10G fiber to the new office, no copper at all. This takes care of grounding issues and is safer.
While SSDs give you speed, their $/TB ratio is still way higher than spinning rust. On sale, you can get 12TB of disk for $175. Roughly the same amount buys you 1TB of SATA SSD, depending on brand and speed a bit.
Very good point, I actually watched a video the other day of a tech wizz that was 'lending' his neighbour (parents) his internet connection via an underground CAT cable. He also used their house for an off-site backup. Turned out not to be too good as a tree in between the properties was struck by lightening and grounded onto the network cable and killed a lot of attached gear.
The house doesn't need a landline voice phone, but in the office I do. So I figured that I would have the new connection (phone/router) in the office and when ready, terminate the house contract. Also makes it easy to claim telecomms as a business expense. I could get a phone line extension but I've had experience with those and while they are generally reliable, I'm not so sure it would extend this distance without unnecessary faff. So I figured keep the router and landline phone next to each other.
Yeah, highly unlikely, but if the safe option is cheaper, I'm all for that.Vaguely overdramatic. A lightning strike at distance can still cause large ground differentials and the mayhem can be amazing. But at least I don't need to sell you on the idea.
Funnily I've had VoIP at my office for the last 12 months and the original intention was not to put the router/phone line in the office, but now I've experienced it, I don't like the cost or the strange reliability. Before this I used a conventional landline for 8+ years and never had any problems - if the broadband went down, the phone line still worked and it took a fairly severe issue for both to become a dead parrot.Consider going VoIP. I am reading "between the lines" so forgive me if I'm wrong, but what you wrote implies to me you want to buy phone service from probably the incumbent local exchange carrier who is also providing the Internet. In the old days of low speed DSL, you could sometimes get a combination where they supplied an actual true POTS line (phone copper going all the way back to the central office). These days that doesn't seem to happen, and usually the "phone" line is a jack on the DSL modem, which gives you access to an internal ATA (analog telephony adapter) which converts IP to pseudo-POTS. The downside to this is that the POTS isn't powered by the CO, so is susceptible to power outages, etc.
Now that's not a horrible technology, but the ILEC's usually seem to want $30-$50/month for it, and it is just crappy pseudo-POTS on the backend, so you don't even get a decent phone out of the deal.
You can go to someplace like VOIPO and pay $189 for two YEARS of a similar service. (Note: I am not associated with them and don't use them myself, but my folks have for many years on my recommendation).
Or you could buy yourself a cloud-hosted PBX and some nice VoIP phones. This can end up being roughly as expensive as the ILEC ATA in the long run, but gives you AWESOME features and if you buy decent phones, great phones too.
If you're a little more masochistic, and many of us running FreeNAS might qualify, you can even run your own Asterisk, buy your DID's and dialtone wholesale, run your own PBX, and have ultimate flexibility -- but I also warn it's a LOT of work to get set up. The upside is that I'm paying around $60-$70/month (total) for phones here. That includes more than two dozen incoming lines for the several businesses I run. Over the last 15 years, if I had to pay the average commercial rate of $30/line, it means I've saved well over $100K... but I *am* just a little bit crazy.
In any case, going VoIP and avoiding the inter-building copper is a good idea if you can.
That's a good point and I'm very sorry you had to go through that. I'm limited with space unfortunately, but also didn't want to clutter up family areas on the ground floor and didn't want to create noise on the first floor (bedrooms), so it has to go in the attic. The new office has a moderate risk of flooding, I wanted to make the building higher, but then it would become and eye sore and likely not receive planning approval. The new office has gotten planning approval despite it's overbearing size.@Bikerchris , thanks for sharing.
Having lost my house to fire that started on the ground floor (floor designations in UK lingo to match drawing), my two servers, workstation, and laptops in the first floor office to water damage, and everything in our second floor (attic) master suite to fire/smoke/water damage, just about the last place I would put my file server would be in an attic unless my "new office" were an obvious high risk location.
Thanks for the sympathy. Your situation understood. Make sure that you can keep the server cool, too, and set it up to email you if drives get towards the toasty side.That's a good point and I'm very sorry you had to go through that.
You're very welcome, I wouldn't want that on my worst enemy (well, perhaps). I will definitely need to have a good think about the temps and keeping them under control, I'm intending to insulate the attic. There is an area up there I can isolate away from the usual rubbish we put up there.Thanks for the sympathy. Your situation understood. Make sure that you can keep the server cool, too, and set it up to email you if drives get towards the toasty side.
Thank you for that, I'm just working on my test build at the moment, it's a very old system but it will allow me to become familiar with FreeNAS, before I start depending on it.if you are planning on using the same RAM and HDDs for the actual FreeNAS install -- make sure that you burn all of those in correctly to make sure nothing's wrong with them.
I always burn in any NEW or USED components that I buy