Building a Homelab

[robMad]

Hi - I was trying to find the best place to post this, and happy to contribute back the deployment walkthrough when it is all working. Given my existing network gear, I elected for this forum

I want to take my existing home network - designed to be wife friendly and update it to include a Home Lab and a Work Lab. My son lives away from home, but I want to put a few machines in the Home Lab (to do media streaming etc.) and create a work vlan

I already have a GT-AX11000 router and GT-AXE11000 router, and Netgear JGS524Ev2 24-Port and GS108Ev3 8 port managed switch. I would prefer not to start again on the hardware, but happy to look if prices are not too crazy.

My current thinking is as follows:

                Internet
                   |
                pfSense
       ---------------------------
      |             |             |
 Home Network   Home Lab      Work Lab
  (VLAN 10)      (VLAN 20)     (VLAN 30)
      |             |             |
 PCs, IoT         NAS,        Test Services
 Devices, TV     Media Server

Reading some of the articles, I am contemplating putting the ASUS kit on the Home Network only. I have been looking at some small boxes, such as the Protectli Vault FW4B, and possibly just park the ASUS in the Home network.

I am open to any thoughts on the network and pointers on tutorials if others have done something similar.

 

[ddaenen1]

Well, the best option would be to have one router/firewall (pfSense) to take care of all the traffic and the VLANs connected to a managed switch. Now the GS is managed but only has 8 ports. Is that enough for your purposes? Not much you can do with the JGS switch as it is unmanaged and you do need a managed switch for VLAN's. Also, i can't think of another purpose than to demote both GT routers to access points and use the ports as an extension of the GS-switch.

Honestly, you would be better off selling both GT routers and the unmanaged switch and get a bigger managed switch and a couple of decent access points. With those, you could deploy the VLANs all the way to unique SSID's for each VLAN. You could use the smaller GS-switch for local LAN port expansion.

 

[coxhaus]

Hi - I was trying to find the best place to post this, and happy to contribute back the deployment walkthrough when it is all working. Given my existing network gear, I elected for this forum

I want to take my existing home network - designed to be wife friendly and update it to include a Home Lab and a Work Lab. My son lives away from home, but I want to put a few machines in the Home Lab (to do media streaming etc.) and create a work vlan

I already have a GT-AX11000 router and GT-AXE11000 router, and Netgear JGS524Ev2 24-Port and GS108Ev3 8 port managed switch. I would prefer not to start again on the hardware, but happy to look if prices are not too crazy.

My current thinking is as follows:

                Internet
                   |
                pfSense
       ---------------------------
      |             |             |
 Home Network   Home Lab      Work Lab
  (VLAN 10)      (VLAN 20)     (VLAN 30)
      |             |             |
 PCs, IoT         NAS,        Test Services
 Devices, TV     Media Server

Reading some of the articles, I am contemplating putting the ASUS kit on the Home Network only. I have been looking at some small boxes, such as the Protectli Vault FW4B, and possibly just park the ASUS in the Home network.

I am open to any thoughts on the network and pointers on tutorials if others have done something similar.

My guess is your wireless would not work well. If you turned off wireless on the wireless routers and used 2 APs it might work.

I think you would be better off building a real network business class. Wireless routers are too limited when it comes to building real networks with lots of networks in them.