Your home network
 

Just curious if anyone has an especially elaborate home network?

Mine right now is extremely simple. I may work from home but don't take work home IYSWIM.

I know of network guys with loads of kit at home; I prefer to keep the kit quotient to a minimum so have what I need and nothing else really.

So who has half a data centre at home and, if you work in IT, do you really love it so much it is a hobby too? :)

Re: Your home network
 

Yes to all of the above.

Although I don't so much have IT as a hobby because I love working in it, I started working in it because I already had it as a hobby.

I find myself regularly making excuses to add more kit that I don't really need.

Re: Your home network
 

Not especially - I am in IT Management now, so obviously I know nothing technical.... :D

Main VM cable comes into the corner of the lounge, which connects to the SH1 (router mode, 2.4Ghz wifi).

Cables come out of the SH1 to
- Cat5 cable that goes back outside the house, and goes to the upstairs office.
- Powerline Adaptor1
- 5 port gigabit switch, which connects to Tivo, BluRay, Xbox

Powerline Adaptor1 connects to Powerline Adaptor2 in the dining room, which is connected to a Tenda N60 (2.4 and 5Ghz)to provide wifi coverage to that side of the house and the right hand side of the back garden

Cat5 cable (from above) in the office connects to a 5 port Gigabit switch, which feeds a Linksys Router for wifi for that side of the house upstairs, main house PC, and a HP printer.

A wifi extender in our bedroom (upstairs) to provide wifi coverage to that side of the back garden.

Devices connected are two PCs (one cable, one wifi), three laptops (all wifi), 2 iPads, a Nexus 7, a HP Win8 tablet, 3 x iPhones, 1 x Samsung S3, Xbox360, BluRay, TiVo, Apple TV, and various guest smartphones.

Security is WPA2-PSK, with only authorised MAC addresses allowed.

Re: Your home network
 

Think it depends on what you call an elaborate setup. I don't see mine as particular complicated but I guess it's a bit more involved than the usual setup of just a client or two connecting to the internet through the isp router. I use my central storage box as a gateway for some machines so they can connect through it's VPN to encrypt their connections and get around geo restrictions etc. A few other unusual routing things I do internally too.

Lots of my devices have DLNA so I can use my phone or tablet to send music/video from one device to another in any room, so that stuff gets used a lot. Also Not just across the network, the AV receiver often gets used for streaming internet radio. Plugins the laptop and phone means I can send a video im watching on say youtube on those devices and send it to the tv or media players instead, or another plugin tells the NAS to download it instead. Using Yahtse remote on my android phone or tablet as a remote for XBMC, I can press a button and the video pauses on the tv and plays on the tablet instead, lots of fun things like that. If my mobile gets a phone call its set to pause the movie im watching as well as display in the corner of the tv who's calling. Also set to popup in the corner if I get emails/messages or whatever with who it is an a snippet of the message but doesnt pause in that case. Don't bother having multiple servers on the network like I used to. The NAS box has enough services and things like SQL running it to not really need a separate server and most things can be done in a VM on the fly these days. If it wasn't for the Synology NAS I use, I would have got the microserver to run a few vm's.

A lot of people get in to computer related work because fiddling with technical things interests them, so it kinda makes sense that they do it at home as well as work. So I guess you could call it a hobby.

Wake on Lan is used for a few things, port knocking and lots of different network type stuff like that. You can have a nice nice network related setup without having to have a lot of equipment really.

Router plugs in to a Netgear prosafe gigabit switch (love those metal box's) and between the two has Onkyo AV, sat box, PS3, Smart tv, Synology NAS an powerline adapters. Other rooms has powerline adapters with a few also having Cisco SE2500 gigabit switches (nice for bedrooms as there is a button to turn off led's) which then connect up to tv's, computers and Raspberry Pi's as media players. Throw in Laptops, android tv sticks, mobile phones, wireless printers, wireless repeater, secondary wireless routers.

Saying it like that it does seem like a lot of equipment but it doesn't feel like there is, if that makes sense.

Re: Your home network
 

My SH1 connects to a router which has 2 wired devices and 19 WiFi devices (not all at the same time).

I use the android app called fing monitor what is connected, you can assign icons and rename what is connected.

Re: Your home network
 

Nothing over complicted, though probably a little more than most.

The Cable Modem and Sky Modem connect to a two way ethernet switch (Normally I use VM, Sky is a back-up). This then connects to the D-Link router which in turn connects to a four way ethernet switch to supply the three PC's local to me. Everything else in the house connects to the router via Wi-Fi. The Sky Modem also connects directly to the work Laptop when I work from home.

Re: Your home network
 

I thought it would take too long to try and explain how I have got stuff laid out around the house so I made a diagram instead (although I think it took just as long)

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/05/4.jpg


Edit: just realised I made a boo boo, there isn't a wired pc downstairs. I haven't included any wireless devices as well.

Re: Your home network
 

You don't appear to have a router or modem either, unless 'sky' is it.

Re: Your home network
 

I don't actually have any more equipment than is required to support my usage.

Obviously the 2 Openreach modems which go into my load balancing router. The only other network kit is a switch lurking behind the TV and a wireless AP.

The devices are the usual mix of TV, Blu Ray, games consoles, phones, tablets, etc, with the only exceptional things being a microserver and a full size one in the office.

Re: Your home network
 

really? I thought there were three wireless routers in that diagram

Re: Your home network
 

Pretty much sums it up for me as well.

My home network is:

Upstairs spare room/office - Superhub 1 with wired connections to two PC's and one microserver(running omv), and occasionally a parallel HP jetdirect printer server for my HP LJ1100.

Downstairs - A WRT-54G router running DD-WRT in access point mode, bridging the wireless back into wired, it enable me to connect me SKY HD box and my LG Blueray player my network.

I have a Sony Xperia Z1, partner has a Galaxy S2.

I also run Fing on Android.

EDIT: Should also state that I normally would use the Superhub as a modem only, but my router went U/S and I haven't got round to replacing it yet.

Re: Your home network
 

Quite handy just having a one bedroomed flat sometimes.

PC rigged into the AV for TV out with full DTS etc sound. SH2 wired to PC, Voda's SureSignal box and to Xbox 360.

Wireless to a couple of laptops, Squeezebox, ipad and phones using home network from the PC. Any more than that seems a waste.

Re: Your home network
 

here you go, this should be better. I hope you'll take note of the lightning for VM's "lightning" fast broadband :rofl:


https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/05/2.jpg

Re: Your home network
 

That's much clearer thanks :)

Re: Your home network
 

I had an old diagram like that for mine, but it's a bit out of date now, plus it only really focused on the internet connections side rather than the internal side:

http://qasdfdsaq.com/images/misc/Int...onnections.png

Re: Your home network
 

My setup's pretty simple, despite working in IT. When I get home I prefer not to spend my downtime "tinkering" unless its a specific project.

My ADSL router's hooked up to an extension phone socket in the spare bedroom (as my master socket was no where near a 13A socket when I moved in). From there it does WiFi for the house (with handy spillover in to the garden). I've removed the ringer wire from all my phone sockets, but as I'm barely 300yds from the telephone exchange my speeds are pretty good.

A pair of Devolo powerline adaptors and a cheapo TP-Link switch then provide ethernet to my Sony BD home cinema unit and my Humax Foxsat HDR, which is running custom firmware. The firmware means the HDR can work as a media server, and is controllable from a web page that's accessible on all my devices. The BD unit does all the "smart" work for my dumb-as-a-post TV.

Future upgrades are a new router, scuppered the other day when Amazon sent me the wrong unit (despite showing the right unit in the images), and relocate the router to the master socket now that there's a socket there.

Re: Your home network
 

mines dead simple. SH2 to a 5 port switch that sorts my Tivo Sky TV and Media PC out. SH2 sorts my PC and its wifi does everything else. Boring compared

Re: Your home network
 

In my experience many IT guys, especially those in the enterprise space, don't generally do that much with their home networks unless they have a specific reason to.

Re: Your home network
 

Mines really simple too

Shub1 (in modem mode) connected to a dlink DIR -615 router

1 ethernet to my pc, 1 to the kids x-box next to the tv

Everything else connects wirelessly

Daughter PC via USB dongle,

4 smartphones
1 chromecast
1 Philips smart tv
3 tablets

I wouldn't like to be in a pre wireless world now I must admit.


Only thing I'd change right now, is perhaps the router for something a bit further reaching. (I can just about get a signal in all of the house, though it's pretty weak at the edges & far enough into the garden to be able to use my phone on a Bluetooth connection to stream from Google music ok.

Can't see the point for any switches or gigabyte hubs etc when there's only one pc hard-wired in my house. (which isn't a mansion clearly as a 615 covers all the rooms)

I like to Keep It simple Stupid (KISS) when possible.

Re: Your home network
 

My setup is a little unusual, but not especially complicated..

Superhub 1 (in modem mode) connected to a Cisco E4200. This is providing wifi and wired access. It's also connected to an Apple Time Capsule that is acting a switch, wifi extender (set up to ensure adequate speed at the back of my house) and NAS. The Time Capsule will also have another function when I've finished checking that I was able to restore all my data properly as I have an external HDD that was hosting a temporary image of my Mac Laptop. This function will be to act as a storage location for Time Machine on the couple of Macs we have.

I know off site backup is best, and any really important data is backed up off site. This is just to enable quicker recovery should something happen to one of the Macs (such as hard drive failure).

Re: Your home network
 

I have a simple set up of
Superhub 2 connected wired to my NAS and Microserver/PC
Wireless connected to laptop, 2 smart phones, smart TV, ipad and PS3

Re: Your home network
 

I've now upgraded to a fully VLAN'd setup with a pfsense firewall/router.

Re: Your home network
 

Whatever floats your boat! ;)

Re: Your home network
 

Well it's not my boat that's the problem. We have some hardcore gamers in the house who constantly complain about crappy latency, which in other words means the latency through an embedded router going up by 10 milliseconds if it's doing something CPU intensive. Apparently, this is unacceptable to them.

Granted, the load average would readily hit 4.0+ on the old router if you tried to view a bandwidth graph at the same time as downloading, and the bandwidth chart would report 100-150Mbps (on a 80Mb line) due to timing problems. It's more the increased processing power of going from 680Mhz MIPS to 4.5Ghz of x86-64 that we wanted.

There's also the problem of Apple devices spamming Avahi announces all over the place killing battery life on mobile phones, hence they're now on an isolated VLAN.

Re: Your home network
 

Things like that are why I'm glad I'm not in a house share.

That and I just generally dislike people.

Re: Your home network
 

My network:

Couple of desktop PCs
Couple of laptops
Couple of tablets, phones etc..

Rubbish 4Mb "broadband" from TalkTalk, router plugged into Netgear 1Gb switch.
TP-Link Wi-Fi access point

The only exciting part is a Synology DS412 with 3 x 3TB drives in RAID5, bonded to the Netgear switch at 2Gb. Also backed up daily using an external 2TB WD passport drive.

Oh - and a CAT5e which runs downstairs to a second 8 port Gb switch to connect the TV and Sky box to the internet.

Re: Your home network
 

Have you had a look at the difference in price between what you are currently paying for your 4mbits an fttc option? If you have seversl TBs if storage you pressumably want a chunky connection to download stuff tout suite.

Re: Your home network
 

All that on a 4Mb connection OUCH

Re: Your home network
 

I wouldn't say ouch much. I assume much of the point of the local storage is so he doesn't have to stream everything from the internet

Re: Your home network
 

A bad WAN connection can force the odd bit of creativity. When on 1.3Mb here I was plotting a whole gamut of ways to reduce usage on the broadband, including inserting a caching proxy (including secure sites to maximise benefit) and using WAN optimization to a virtual instance in a datacentre.

Re: Your home network
 

I have a Dell optiplex gx520 small form running the mikrotik routeros with a onbroad what i assigned as WAN (Connects to my Sky Hub 192.168.0.0/24) and i have another network card for a LAN side (172.31.43.0/24) connected to a netgear gs116 16-port 1Gig port switch what i have my;

Gaming PC
Wifes PC
Media Centre box in the living room & spare bedroom
Xbox 360
PS4
TiVo box
Sky box (for anytime in the bedroom)

Also have a Netgear WiFI PCI card but it dosnt give much of a signal as we only use it for are phones and one tablet and the squzze box music thing in the kitchen and the nowtv box whats in the spare living room.

I did setup a small Squid cache but theses days ISPs use CDN so there really no point.

Re: Your home network
 

Don't get me started! We've heard all stories from Openreach - the last one was Network Rail won't let them run the fibres under the track. Six months before it was a full duct.

We are scheduled to get "superfast broadband" Q3 2015 - possibly before.

---------- Post added at 20:53 ---------- Previous post was at 20:52 ----------

Nope - it serves a backup for my data and photography. Those RAW files are ~25MB a pop and is soon starts eating the GB's!