Okay, so this is where the new setup actually begins.

The old one was minimal, literally just Wi-Fi from my ISP router to a laptop in a corner and an HP Elitedesk plugged straight into the back of it. It definitely worked, but now I’m trying to do it properly and in a way that allows me to scale properly as my homelab grows. And I can’t really start playing with the lab until the foundations are there.

Internet comes in downstairs into the living room courtesy of Virgin Media. Not my preferred ISP… but it’s not simple to leave them and we’re not had any major problems to be fair, so they’ll do for now. Their router is one of their sub-standard Super Hubs and it’s now in modem mode. It used to do everything but now it’s just passing the internet along and stays quiet.

The house has Ethernet ports in loads of rooms (some absolute hero wired it all up before I moved in), all of which go up to a patch panel in the attic. I worked out which port corresponds to the one in the living room through trial and error with the old HP laptop since it has an Ethernet port, and ran the modem-mode connection through the patch panel to the landing on the first floor, in between the attic and the living room, which is roughly in centre of the house.

On the landing, I plugged in an Asus DSL-AC68U that someone was giving away for free on Freecycle (huge fan of Freecycle!). It’s decent and gives me way more control than the Virgin box. It’s now my main router and the only Wi-Fi access point for now. I don’t get perfect coverage, but it’ll do until I can save up for a mesh system or something fancier, and it’s still considerably better than what the Super Hub was giving me from the living room.

The Asus lets me set up a couple of guest networks so I’ve created two:

1. One hidden guest Wi-Fi that can only be joined via a QR code (for actual guests in my house) which is displayed in the dining room, kinda like you’d see in a café
2. One for IoT devices that don’t need to be anywhere near the main network… So far that’s just a free Google Nest Mini which is nothing more than a glorified kitchen timer, but I’ve seen all the cool stuff that Frigate can do, so I’d love to get some cameras soon

The Asus also has a second Ethernet port, so I patched that back up into the attic and connected a cheap unmanaged switch to it which is doing all of the heavy lifting for the wired connections in my house. From that switch, I’ve got three cables running:

1. Back into the patch to the port in my office, where I’ve connected that old HP laptop (which I have since removed the screen from)
2. To the HP Elitedesk G3 mentioned in the previous post
3. To another HP Elitedesk G3 which I’ve since acquired

Eventually I want to run another cable back down to the living room and stick a switch down there because I want my PS5 and smart TV on Ethernet. Right now they’re on the Wi-Fi which isn’t ideal but they work well enough.

I also really want to replace the unmanaged switch with a managed one (then I wouldn’t actually need to buy another switch for the living room, I could just take that one downstairs) so I can start using VLANs properly, but that’s another thing I’ll need to save for. Right now everything’s just on the same network and I’m trusting that nothing will go wrong…

So that’s where the network side of things is at right now. It works, it’s more thought out than last time, and it gives me a decent base to start building stuff on top of.