Your home network

Curious, what kinds of home networking setups do you all use at home, especially those that have Flames and run projects from home.

Do you strictly use wifi? Are you running ethernet cables across the living room floor? Do you go all out with VLANs?

I have a Synology in the basement where my router and modem is. then i wired cat6 to my office(was my daughters room but not anymore. lol) The synology although not the fastest is great for compatability between linux, mac, and windows. everything sees it, reads it. no problems.

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No experience in VLANS, but can you separate a network simply by different IP subnet? instead of the usual 192. i had at one point had all my work computers on a 10. IP address threefore making them separate. actually i only did that because i could. i dont know if theres any advantage…

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wifi is way to slow, i use ethernet and a 10gb switch

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this might open some issues if your mac isnt 10gb compatible but for my laptop I just use that sanlink to thunderbolt to get 10gb speeds out of it, great little device

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I might have overdone it at home, but I was always doing Home-Lab stuff at home, so yea … custom storage node, Pfsense router as a VM , VLANs, guest Wifi all the 9 yards, I also have ethernet in every room of my house (Cat 7) and run a fiber line to my neighbour to use his WAN for fallback, there is almost nothing that can stop me from working :smiley:

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@space_monkey which 10gb switch are you using?

How’s pfsense treating you? I’ve dipped my toes in the Ubiquiti pool.

I dont have a 10G switch, I run direct 100Gbit inifniband fibre to my workstation from the NAS, its 1 room over and i just put cables through the wall :stuck_out_tongue: its a “bit” excessive but then … same price as 10G copper so whatever.

Pfsense is awesome , i have multiple WANs and stuff and I can failover and bond them e.t.c , like I have a seperate wan jsut for my nas as it auto-syncs to another nas that I keep at a friends place as live replication, and we can work on the same stuff together and its like beign in the same studio , so all the routing for everything, kids get their own WAN as well and I have all the priority :smiley:

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i bought the netgear pro safe XS708T , it was about four years ago so not sure of the newer version of it but haven’t had any troubles at all with it, and yea I set up a Vlan as well with it but honestly depends on how many devices you have and what level of security you want, not sure that part of it was totally worth it.

Nice. I’m tinkering with 4G LTE WAN failover at the moment and looking forward to 5G solutions.

What hardware are you running your pfsense on?

There was a good write up on the Ubiquiti gear over at Mixing Light.

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Used to run it on a baremetal old i5 office pc, but hence migrated it to a self build Rack mounted VMware Host. thats some older server hardware I picked up, put in some better CPUs(dual Xeon) I also run some docker stuff on it like a resolve Database and other utillity stuff, like a plex server , but hey complete overkill…

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All of my computers are in the basement, where my office is too :(. Only place I could put under lock and key to kept my twin 3 year olds away from the “good stuff” as they call it.

I have run an ethernet from my modem down to the basement for internet. Between machines, (laptop Mac, Mac Pro 2019, PC windows) I just use thunder bridge. It’s Fast enough. I picked up the OWC Thunderbay Flex 8, and it will power my laptop, and allow me to connect via thunder bridge all on one thunderbolt 3 cord. It’s nice.

I do have an active 50 foot HDMI cable and a usb 2.0, Run back upstairs. When I’m working late, or nobody is home, I’ll use a desk I have set up in the living room. I’ll just unplug my monitor (two cables, USB C, power) and hike it upstairs, then plug in 3 cables (Hdmi, usb, power). The Monitor is a hub, so I can plug everything into it. (Sound, keyboard, Wacom).

Side note about the HDMI, it’s one way, and of course, I found that out the hard way.

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i have both ethernet and wifi in my house…i use a set of devices called TP-Link Powerline which uses your homes internal electrical copper wiring and turns it into a data network. Very cheap - around £30 for a pair, you plug one into the mains near your router, connect a cat5/6 cable to it, then put the other unit where you need an ethernet connection, and use a second cat cable between it and the computer. You can also have several units connected to expand it around the house. each of mine feed into small gigabit switchers to connect various devices.

My internet connection only manages around 50-60mb download, but i have tested this across wifi and the various ethernet powerline connections and the speed seems consistent.

I have tried a spot of editing via a vpn connecting to my office, 20 miles away and going through the powerline adapters to the router. Just using the macs screen sharing facility, i was able to prep and send out a few commercials, with surprisingly little lag.

Might not be fast enough for heavy vfx jobs, but at a push it works better than nothing. Only caveat is a didnt figur eout how to get the audio using screen share!

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Ah, yes, the benefits of networked attached storage!

Ha! Young twins? Coronavirus? Probably most often the latter not the former, right? Oh yeah, one way cables are a bloody nightmare. I also love all the dongles that are one way…I battled that for a few weeks…HDMI to Mini Display port is not the same as Mini Display port to HDMI!!! ARGH!!! PTSD!!!

And what are you using for storage? That sounds like fun!

Nice! I used No Machine recently which seems to be all the rage for software screen sharing…audio works well and the whole ecosystem is simple…far better than VNC.

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I am using a supermicro 4U server with 100TB nothing fancy just a simple xfs raid hut I got offsite replication and LTO just to be safe of course