Well, I’m just about finished my core network upgrade that I started, really, last winter. Here’s what has transpired since Christmas (links to posts, etc. in line):
- Santa bought me a TP-Link TL-SG1024DE. It gave me the VLANs I was looking for but it didn’t give me everything I was looking for but it worked for now.
- The old SonicWall TZ205W was getting a little long in the tooth and I replaced it with a pfSense box.
- The Netgear/D-Link access points being manually configured bugged me so I bought a Ubiquiti UniFi AC AP Lite.
- Since the TP-Link switch wasn’t doing it for me and I liked the Ubiquiti gear so much I replaced it with a Ubiquiti Switch 24.
- I hated the wire rack I was using for the network and server gear so I replaced it with a homemade one.
- Three NASes were too much even for a geek like me and they needed an upgrade. So three of the NASes, one with an external hardware eSATA disk enclosure, were replaced with a Supermicro Server with FreeNAS.

So, what’s next? There are three empty drive bays in the FreeNAS box. I will eventually be setting up a RAIDZ pool for my ESXi NFS shares. And, of course, there are the two Quanta S98J QSSC 1U rackmount server cases. I need another HBA, external cables, and drives to make them useful.