Following setup with only 2 ports possible?

[iammike]

Thx Bart.

First of all Yes I remember what you said that it will work, but those 2 Ports limitation is still in my mind. Now I am again reading up (I know sometimes it's best to do nothing and just do what you have been told and just cascade the switch), and on reading up it says somewhere that I could use also as My Main switch an L3 switch and on my searches I come across 2 "affordable" ones

A https://www.tendacn.com/product/teg5310p-8-150w.html
or
a 2nd hand Cisco SG350-10 10-Port Gigabit Managed Switch

Price wise they are approx the same.
(Personally I would go for the Cisco)

What do you think?

So it would be WWW - OpnSense - L3 switch and then further on to 2 L2 switches?

TiA

[bartjsmit]

The Tenga is gigabit only but the Cisco has a fan  Much nicer to have fan-less kit. Essential if you sleep close to it.

L3 means that the switch has layer 3 capability - i.e. it is able to act as a router. You don't have enough clients to make that worth your while. Having OPNsense as your only router is perfectly fine.

It is worth doing some mental modelling of your network and draw a heat map. Try divide it into core switches  where a lot of traffic comes together, and access switches where only a handful of devices connect. Any of the 'cold' zones are fine with gigabit and WiFi tops out at around 80Mbps anyway, so you'll need dozens of clients running at full speed to saturate an AP, especially with WiFi 6.

You may not even have enough traffic to get close to gigabit anywhere, in which case it is worth waiting until the first adopters move on to 25 and 40Gbps, leaving everybody else with 10G kit that has repaid its R&D and is cheap and cheerful.

Measure twice and cut once, as the saying goes

Bart...

[iammike]

Thx Bart (once again)

Fan-less or with Fan I don't care much as it will live ("it lives" as Igor F said  ) in the living room near the 2 NAS and even it was in the bedroom I still wouldn't hear it, the aircon is noisier then that I guess

My thought was to create an easier path and to lighten the load on the OpnSense with the L3 taking away from the load.

1 GiB it has to stay for a while as upgrading my LAN to 2,5 GiB would mean a great deal more of investing.

The Cisco I could get for around 100 Euro's (equivalent) with a guarantee of 3 months and I was wrong it isn't a 10 but a 20. (NO PoE). The Tenda would be a bit more expensive but only 8 ports, but that said I would only need 3 ports hahahahaha