Welcome to True Freedom Tech's hardware overview. This section covers our system architecture. We will cover our 2 types of servers, the compute node, and the storage node, as well as our networking hardware and software.
Building computers is pretty commonplace nowadays, you can find thousands of tutorials online showing you how to build a PC. This is a little bit different, we are going to focus on server-level applications. Some of these parts you will probably already know about. Others took hours to find with lots of research and comparison to find what suits us best. This is meant to give you a solid framework of how to proceed with your own server architecture. At the end, in the networking section, we are going to show you how to wire it all together so that it works!
We will only be covering things that apply to our application, you can visit TrueFreedomTech.com for courses that go in-depth to specific topics.
The compute node is our solution to processing power. The job of This server is to keep things running 24/7 all year round. When designing our servers we try to find parts that can satisfy all of our needs and then only use that part for every server. This is really important as it simplifies the overall system. We ONLY use AMD Processors! Why? Because the am4 socket is magical. A Ryzen 3 processor can be swapped with a Ryzen 9 processor at any moment. The only downside could be your motherboard, which we have taken into account. The compute node does not prioritize GPU power. Our computers run headless, meaning they do not have a GUI… Command-line baby! Since you don't need a GPU these servers are significantly cheaper.
The storage node is our solution to… storage. There are many ways you can go with this and we will show you multiple configurations including SSD, HDD, SATA m.2, and NVME. Each of these has its own pros and cons. HDDs are the slowest but the cheapest. SATA m.2 can only go as fast as an SSD but takes up way less space, and can be a bit cheaper. NVME are expensive and hard to have a ton of because they use PCI lanes, this means bigger size drives which means lots more money. SSDs are expensive but run on SATA which allows for a lot of drives. We will go a lot more in-depth to these issues in the storage node section. The rest of the hardware is pretty standard to the compute node. Still the same CPU, RAM, and Boot disk. Different motherboard (Same Chipset), networking card, and OS.
This section breaks down the hardware behind our networking, Including our Routers, Firewall, Switches, and cables. We will show you how to set up pfsense, our firewall and router of choice, and explain the options you have to run pfsense. pfsense is an operating system just like any other operating system, you can install it on any machine. Meaning any machine can be a router and firewall! Most things in our network are prebuilt and just work. Netgear switch, plug it in, turn it on, patch in. Cable… buy the latest cat version cable available, don't go cheap on a cable because you think it doesn't matter as much. No, we will not be covering how to make your own ethernet cables, maybe in the future, we will have a course available!