Lapis the Nevrean

I have homelab computers and I wanted to learn how to work with 10 gigabit gear! I don't strictly need it but distcc and sftp will benefit from having it among other things.

I'm seriously considering swapping my current NAS storage for a clustered filesystem which will benefit too. I really really want the storage to fit inside the computers so I can use faster links to the drives and the cheapest way to make that happen is to put the storage inside multiple computers. Scrubs are getting bottlenecked badly by USB 3.0 right now and I don't want to deal with a disk shelf.

Update: the install was a bit rough actually.

I updated routerOS even though I didn't intend to use it just to make sure the device had up-to-date firmware and stuff, and that went Just Fine. I couldn't figure out how to update swOS from inside routerOS because it would just fail to run the updater so I continued without it (this becomes important momentarily).

Everyone that uses this gear recommends getting it into swOS immediately and then pretend it was always just a switch, because it can only route at about 2.7Gbps but it can switch eight ways at line speed, so I bought it with that intent. It's nice to have the option tho.

I struggled to find the toggle to reboot into swOS (It's in the routerBOARD menu) and then it rebooted but it never showed up on the network??? I change my desktop's IP to something on the static fallback network and I'm able to get into it and it just didn't attempt to DHCP... It turns out there's an oversight in old versions of swOS where if it has to use the static IP fallback then it will never reattempt to get a DHCP address. So you need to get into it and update swOS as soon as possible, and THEN it will behave as expected.

Anyway after all that was dealt with I plugged in some 10Gtek modules and fiber cables and my homelab gear started working immediately. 10/10. :P