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My Overkill Home Network

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Re: My Overkill Home Network

#211

Post by theshrike79 »

Dah00n wrote: post #207
pottertheotter wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I can get is cable internet so this worries me. What’s the best way to implement power isolation and surge protection?

If you want to isolate the internet connection with fiber you can use an ethernet to fiber box. Something as simple and cheap as this would do: https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/accessory/mc2...

+1 for the TP-link, I've got one running fiber to my AV equipment :)

It was a lot easier to run a pair of fiber-optic cables there than it would've been to do the same with cat6. Also I got to play around with fiber for the first time.

Never thought of isolating my modem from the rest of my gear though, I need to look into that.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#212

Post by trustingtrust »

Biggest problems I have faced for home networks : ISPs are poorly configured and do very shady things sometimes like DNS hijacking. More often than not poor ONU firmware or hardware means you will see weird things like latency spikes or straight up packet drops. Sometimes IPv6 won't work if the ONU is in bridge mode etc. etc.

This post is overkill but what mostly works for home networks:

SQM - like cake sqm in openwrt - will work wonders if don't have a great ISP. I have seen as much as 5% packet loss on one ISP who said thats acceptable for a home network. Just reduce the load until a point where packet loss is really low. Then use a DNS resolver. DNS resolver will be much more reliable like unbound for your local network as packet loss has cause really problems with DNS for me. Cheap home network equipment dns is not reliable. You could really just buy a cheap Pi and run a local resolver. It would work a lot better than your home router. You may also want to consider replacing the ONU. This is rather easier than you think. The ISP ONU are really bad. A cheap NOKIA SFP GPON is like 20$ on eBay and if you can figure out the PLOAM password and Serial and Mac and VPN ID of your ISP, you will be able to simply swap it for a more stable link.

All in all I would suggest for a simple home setup: get a cheap SFP GPON and replace your ONU. Get a cheap router (either router on stick with Rpi4 for <500mbit or x86 box with SFP for hitting 1gbps with the SFP GPON) and run your own unbound resolver. Get some APs and either wire them or get a cheap mesh router 3 pack on amazon (you can get a wifi 6 3 pack for under 150$ these days on sale) and run it in AP mode.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#213

Post by phito »

hqsolomo wrote: post #8

Nice and clean, great work! If you don't mind me asking, does your energy bill take a huge blow because of this? I had a modest homelab set up and had to start shutting things off due to how much it costs to keep it running I apologize if I missed this info in the blog!

I had bought an used enterprise server (Dell something), but it just used too much power and made some much noise. It's not as professional or reliable as op's homelab, but I'm now hosting most of my stuff on an Intel NUC. It's a much better fit for my use case and budget

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#214

Post by meitham »

This is beautiful and inspirational! I am about to redo my messy homelab and have two questions: 1. I don’t see any labels attached to the cables, how do you know which-is-what? 2. I am on pfsense too but I was considering a move to OPNSense, would you explain why you choose pfsense over opnsense? Thanks

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#215

Post by petepete »

jolux wrote: post #3

I just bought a Ubiquiti Dream Machine SE along with a U6 Enterprise a few weeks ago and so far it’s my favorite tech purchase ever. The management interface is years if not decades ahead of everything else I’ve used before. My only complaint is that there’s no public API and thus no official Terraform providers.

I love my Dream Machine too. I bought it about six months ago and it's been solid and was really easy for me, a novice with advanced networking, to get going with vlans and firewall rules.

I don't need this setup at all, like I don't need cat6 ports in every room, there's definitely an element of it being a hobby. Maybe I just like flashing LEDs.

Sonos gear still using STP was an unwanted pain, all part of the fun I guess.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#216

Post by ThatPlayer »

What are the plans for the Meshastic mesh? I think having one hooked up to a server to do responses could be interesting. Or have you actually convinced other people to carry one around for messages?

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#217

Post by teddyh »

femto wrote: post #162

I used to have a home network, until lightning hit nearby. It came up the power connection and the copper phone connection. The modem/router/switch fried, then it spread out though the twisted pair Ethernet and fried every interface connected to the network. These days I use WiFi unless I really need low latency / high reliability in a particular location. Optical would be nice, but WiFi is the poor man's lightning s…

Couldn’t lightning just as well fry everything connected to power? In that case, WiFi will not save you.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#218

Post by nanidin »

fzeindl wrote: post #202
matthew-wegner wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built a pretty serious "homelab" over a few years, in the sense of building out 24/7 services as robustly as possible. There is an element of practicality for very long-term maintenance if you run i.e. VMs off a different storage layer. But mostly? It felt exactly like exploring computers in my childhood for the first time (I'm 43 now). I was bumping into things I had never bumped into it before, and it was really…

> There is an element of practicality for very long-term maintenance if you run i.e. VMs off a different storage layer. That is very good advice. I know about a datacenter outage/degradation in a very large company, which all of you know. A couple of network switches got overloaded. The switches connected the SAN to the VMs, so it caused all kinds of weird problems in different applications.

AWS or cloudflare?

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#219

Post by teddyh »

monstermunch wrote: post #161
riley_dog wrote: post #160

This person is pretty average over on /r/homelab.

I've stopped posting there as much, when my colo post got removed for not being "in my house" i knew it was going downhill

If you think a colo is a “homelab”, then maybe you’ve gone downhill.

Re: My Overkill Home Network

#220

Post by bombcar »

pottertheotter wrote: post #185
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is why I like fiber optic cables. Lightning can't surge the modem if there's no electrical connection. And then standard power isolation and surge protection will handle all the power connections. I've yet to loose equipment to lightning from the power cables but I literally can't count the amount of equipment that has been killed by lightning striking a copper data line and then surging through my network.

All I can get is cable internet so this worries me. What’s the best way to implement power isolation and surge protection?

You can never get perfect isolation from lightning (a direct hit will almost certainly take something out) but you can do worse than making sure you have an excellent grounding rod setup and a whole-home surge protector, which you monitor.

And then you can put surge equipment on any other incoming wires.

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