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  1. #1

    Connection change

    Geeky stuff ahead. Not game related

    After I moved house almost two years ago, I setup my Internet connection and haven't made too many changes since. One of the things I did which I really wanted to change since day one was to get rid of the Zyxel router my provider provided me. I had it setup to basically forward all traffic to my PFSense router. The only thing it was used for was to separate the VLANs for Internet, TV and phone.

    Last night between 04:45 and 06:04 there was a power outage. Which is kinda unheard of here. Everything came back on, except there seemed to be a weird NAT issue where we were unable to access the sites hosted here. So I decided enough was enough. I removed the Zyxel router my provider gave me and plugged my fiber box directly into my PFSense router. I configured the appropriate VLANS and things started working. When I say "directly into my PFSense router" I mean that I first removed the VMWare virtual switch and network adapters, then configured a quad-port Intel server network card in passthrough mode for the PFSense virtual machine and used that for it's WAN and LAN interfaces.

    In PFSense I don't think you can define a MAC address on a VLAN interface thus you're stuck with whatever you're physical NIC has. Because of this my public IP address has changed. I've already changed various DNS records to point to the new location. People may have experienced this as HappyDiggers being down for a while.

    One of the reasons I never wanted to use the Zyxel router my provider provided is because it's a piece of junk. Before the change my latency to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange was around 4ms. Now it's about 2.5ms. I don't have a graph of the monitoring of my provider's gateway that shows this clearly due to there being a large spike in packet loss (connection was unplugged/down) which skews the graph so you can't see what's going on. I do have a graph of a host in a nearby data center that shows things clearly:
    Name:  before and after.png
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    As you can see the latency is a bit lower and much more stable now with much less noise. Looking at the graph for my gateway monitoring for the past hour you can see how low the latency is right now. One and a half millisecond of change shows up as a peak in the graph.
    Name:  gateway monitoring.png
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    So a power outage, some raging about a piece of junk Zyxel router, a bit of VMWare trickery and PFSense stuff later, we are down a whopping 1.5ms. Yeah, nobody is ever going to notice that but I'm still glad about the change

  2. #2
    Nice! This is exactly what I want to do too! I even have the quad port card installed in anticipation of doing this. I haven't made the switch yet due to the static IP problem previously discussed.

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