Network Redesign
This is not really related to the ToE like the rest of the blog, but who cares? It’s my site and my blog. If you’re into networking, this might be interesting for you anyway.
Today, I remodeled my home network. I was not happy with the old design, even though it worked fine. This is basically my development environment, and it bothered me that I did not have a clean structure. The network grew over quite some time but was complicated and had not much thought behind it. Especially the many subnets were a sort of a pain, and the USG was not really efficient where it was used.
So I thought for a while about how to improve this and concluded first that I’d employ, in addition to the three routers, a new switch. This switch’s subnet is able to handle up to 10 Gbps & 2.5 Gbps. I couldn’t put a 10 Gbps card into the server as it only had a 1x PCIE slot—and even with a riser, it would not be able to fulfill that bandwidth—so a 2.5 Gbps solution works here just fine. Additionally, for the 10 Gbps, I wanted real fiber optic cables, no longer Cat8 Ethernet with an SFP+ adapter. So I went with a 10Gtek AOC that is basically a multimode OM3 with properly insulated ends.
The new setup was quite cheap, totaling below 150 EUR and is way cleaner: Instead of half a dozen subnets, I now have only three: one main for all the machines, one for the WiFi clients that also have RADIUS, and one for smart home appliances. All are nicely separated with the USG. I adjusted the routing and the individual IPv4 addresses to make it work. I’m only using static IPs and routes, and no IPv6. Static DNS names and a custom ‘.lan’ domain for all devices. I’m sort of proud; it works fine as of now. I still need to figure out WOL, probably in the coming weeks I’ll try to get that to work.
