Recently a client testing their 5G solution came to me asking for a solution to testing speed from their CBRS/5G/802.11ax clients. One of the requirements was it had to support greater than 1 gig speedtests as close to the devices as possible. This particular client has a small cell device which has room for a small form factor PC. The challenge was finding a small PC that could handle a 10 gig port.
In steps my buddy John from Columbus. John is up on hardware more than I am. After some talks, we settled on the following two pieces of hardware.
https://www.amazon.com/NUC8i7BEH-Quad-Core-i7-8559U-Bluetooth-Thunderbolt/dp/B07JJPF8MV/
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- front view of the nuc
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- Back view of the nuc
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- box. gi joe for size
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- Contents of the Box
https://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-Technologies-Thunderbolt-10GBASE-T-SOLO10G-TB3/dp/B07BZRK8R8/
Intel Nuc, Sonnet 10 Gig adaptor, Mikrotik HexS
Once we assembled this we need a router for the Internet and DHCP. We chose a RouterBoard hexS
https://www.ispsupplies.com/MikroTik-RouterBOARD-RB760iGS
As a not both of these will run off DC power. The Nuc comes with a 19Volt power supply so if you are running Pure DC you may want to drop from, say a 24volt battery bank to 19 volt with a Meanwell converter.
The Software
Proxmox was installed on the Nuc. Nothing crazy about this. Just make sure the thunderbolt adaptor is plugged in during install. For our purposes, we are just using the 10 gig adaptor. Proxmox recognizes the adaptor without a hiccup.
In some earlier blog posts I wrote about the self-hosted speedtests.
https://blog.j2sw.com/networking/self-hosted-speed-test/
https://blog.j2sw.com/xisp/self-hosted-speedtest/ (Patreon Subscription Required)
I installed the self-hosted speedtest under a Centos Minimal Install. Everything was put on a 172.16.x.x network. This was done in order to prevent any conflicts with various types of Internet the Mikrotik may be plugged into. By default, port 1 is set up to be a DHCP client. In our setup, the Internet is the bottleneck, but we are not testing the Internet. We are testing clients on the 5g/CBRS/802.11ax network. Our 10 gig port on the nuc will be plugged into a 10 gig switch at the small cell, and not into our routerboard. The routerboard is just there to hand out DHCP and allow Internet access, if available.
