[mythtv-users] Motherboard recommendation

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 19 Aug 2014 09:18:16 -0400, you wrote:

>On 8/18/2014 5:05 PM, Dan Wilga wrote:
>> - At least 3 Ethernet ports, using an Intel chipset
>
>You're not going to find anything with three ethernet ports.  You might 
>find something with two ports, and a third dedicated IPMI port.  The 
>only way you're going to get more than two functional ports is with a 
>discrete card.  I can understand two, if you want to use this as a 
>router, but I don't know what value three would be.

I can think of several uses for more ethernet ports.

A common router configuration is:

Port 1: WAN
Port 2: DMZ
Port 3: Main protected subnet

And often you also want your wireless connection on a separate subnet
too.

While standard on business networks, having a DMZ for your Internet
accessible servers is not so common for home networks.  But there are
those of us (like me) who do that - I have been running my own web and
SMTP servers since I first got a broadband connection.

Another use is to have a separate subnet for the kids, with full
protections applied to it (eg forcing all web traffic through a proxy
server).

Having a separate subnet for connecting your ethernet tuners seems to
also be something that has been recommended, since a lot of them use
UDP to transmit the data and just one lost packet due to congestion
can cause a problem in a recording.

Having an extra ethernet port can also be used for less common things,
like two bonded ethernet connections to double the throughput - useful
when moving around huge files like HD recordings.  With a
configuration like that (two bonded 1 gigabit ports), you have enough
bandwidth that the lan connection is faster than any except the
fastest SSD drives, so you get real-time transfer from disk on one box
to disk on another.

I agree with wanting Intel chipsets for ethernet too - there are some
pretty bad Linux drivers for some of the Realtek chipsets that are
common on motherboards, and they cause lots of problems.  The Intel
drivers are excellent, as are the Intel chipsets.  On my MythTV box,
the otherwise excellent motherboard (Asus M5A97 Evo) has an
RTL8111/8168/8411 ethernet port, which just stops working every so
often when I copy big files through it using SMB protocol.  So I added
a dual Intel PCIe card, and that has also increased the throughput and
given me a separate subnet I used to use for my satellite box.