A CS student’s shallow dive into Home Networking

Generally, when you think of your home network, it includes a router that provides internet to the whole house, be it through a wired connection or a wireless signal. I have always believed to have a decent understanding of making a home network until recently when I was thrown to the fire. What happens when you have most of your family working from home at all times and you start to have issues with the internet? Chaos ensues. That is what happens. So, I started my journey to become a network administrator for my house to build a “pro-sumer” network on a home network budget. There are some huge pitfalls and small tips and tricks for creating a powerful network.

So how did I get into this mess? Our family will have several people working on the internet at once, anywhere from 3-4 people. We have a full gigabit fiber connection as well so more than enough bandwidth. We had a pretty decent router. It was a newer Wifi 6, gigabit router from a reputable manufacture. Wifi coverage was okay. We recently added a mesh device with it to help cover our decent sized house. It worked for our needs until suddenly it did not. Every hour, the router would start to lose the WAN connection and require a reboot. Even after a factory reset, same behavior. It has a two year warranty so I reached out to their customer service, but they wanted to have us try new settings with DNS and experiment around, but here is the problem, people are working. I can’t just experiment with the internet when people need to use it for work. What is even harder is after work, guess what, they want to use it for leisure. I found my first hurdle in network admin, RELIABILITY. I did a few of the changes to see if I could take care of it and nothing. Same behavior. I had also used an older “Fast Ethernet” (limited to 100Mbps, 10x slower than our connection) equipped router to make sure it wasn’t an issue with our ISP. After determining that the ISP was not the issue, the support staff still wanted to keep experimenting on settings. I didn’t have anymore time. I had family members who were mad at slow and unreliable internet. Time for a change.

First thing first was getting our internet back online at full capacity without waiting on a new router. Luckily, I have an old dual gigabit Network Interface card. I know I can spin up a PFSense router with that on my home server. I have only experimented with it in the past with no real premise, but after seeing the current build of PFSense, it actually has become rather user friendly. After installing the card and then telling my host operating system (Windows Server 2022) to give the entire card to the PFSense VM, I was up and cooking within a few minutes of installing. All of a sudden, with very little infrastructure, I was able to get our router up with a free solution! Obviously, if my server died, the internet could go down, but I am able to make a copy of my configuration and can get the firewall back on almost immediately on my desktop on Hyper-V or an old computer with two network interfaces. That easily solves that. I chose obviously to keep things simple and have PFSense be my firewall and DHCP server. Though in the future, I could role up a separate DHCP server that then could handle all of my LAN interfaces separately than my firewall. It gives me a solid base. Now, up to this point, I have been using the separate mesh device to provide Wifi from PFSense. It only had a 100Mbps port so now only wired clients were getting that full gigabit speed. Now a journey down wireless networking.

So we have actually been through many routers in my house. We have had a gigabit connection at our house since they offered it in my area in 2014. Most either die after a year or two. Most have terrible wireless signal. The recent Wifi 6 router we had was the best solution so far, but something had to change. Time to look at the business sector. Since our gateway was taken care of, we just needed an access point. These will get you into a rabbit hole real quick. It essentially is investing into an ecosystem with a specific brand. Some brands have cheaper points, but require a “management” application that can either be ran on a paid for cloud experience or local machine. Since I have a server in use, this was an option. Some do run in a “standalone” mode for basic use, but you lose out on features if you want to add more. After reading a lot of reviews, I decided on a brand which is an enterprise brand, but not as mainstream as other popular solutions based on price, Wifi 6, and free cloud management. It was here within a day off Amazon. I do not want to reveal the brand on this blog, but for a enterprise/business product, setting the product up was easier than most consumer routers. I chose to go with the cloud management for the feature set. It was as simple as scanning a QR code on the device, signing up an account, setting the SSIDs and the passwords. After having to resort to a mesh system before for our Wifi to cover our house, I was scared I would need another access point. That was easily subsided within a quick walk around the house. I easily get full speed anywhere in the house on Wifi where my phone is the bottleneck first. After years of degraded Wifi and being in the consumer space, I finally found the endgame solution for internet.

So takeaway from this. First, the best part of this? When your family no longer asks about the internet, it means it is working. Second part, I learned a lot about larger networking. Solutions that 10 years ago would have been left to classically trained network admins are now very accessible for the consumer. I was able to spin up a small business capable network for less than 100USD. I learned a lot about network settings and practices from the new material out there. Building a modular network with redundant points of failure instead of everything on one single point of failure and stop a lot of headache down the road. I implore everyone to do a little reading into your own network as it opens a world of possibilities. I now am running a VPN from my own home so I can access everything and also have a DNS sinkhole for blocking ads. It makes homelab outside of programming possible. It gives me a further understanding of how our world stays connected.