Home Network Setup - pfSense, VLANs, VPN, HAProxy, 10G, and more

home networking can be one of the most simple things in your entire setup or one of the most complicated and pretty much anything in between it just depends on your use case and how many devices you have and how complicated you want it to be now for me someone with a home server a couple of pcs a couple of laptops and some smart home devices i really wouldn't consider myself to be an advanced user with advanced needs but i would say my home networking setup is more on the advanced side so what am i running let's check it out [Music] all right before i get into it i just want to say really quickly if you're a fan of the channel and a fan of these videos please consider subscribing it helps a lot uh with the channel as small as small as mine and i would really appreciate it if you would consider subscribing it would help a bunch and also i'm not going to ask you to like the video yet because you haven't really seen it so if you liked the video at the end please consider dropping a like okay home networking there are basically four major components that go into 99.9 of home networking setups that being a modem a router a switch and a wireless access point in a lot of cases your isp is going to provide you with a box that acts as basically all four of those things and that's what i mean when i say your home networking can be one of the simplest things in your entire setup now more common setup is to take that modem provided to you by your isp and then pair it with a more advanced router that you get on your own something from netgear linksys asus whatever now that router is generally going to act as your router your switch and your wireless access point in my case though i actually have a dedicated modem a dedicated router a dedicated switch and two access points so that's what i mean when i say mine's more on the advanced side of a basic home networking setup so let's jump into it the modem is just a standard modem provided to me by my isp which is charter spectrum and one quick thing i don't have much to say about the modem but whoever chartered decided that the modem should only have a mobile app interface and no web gui at all um what ceremony is probably the least important part in this entire setup because it's basically there to provide a link to the internet and give you a public ip and that's kind of it the router though is arguably the most important and my router is a netgate sg 1100 now it's not in this box it's actually running because i don't want to shut off my internet i couldn't recommend this router enough if you are someone that wants to do more advanced things in your network like set up customized firewalls set up a vpn do separate vlans set up reverse proxies do custom port forwarding and custom dns stuff this thing will do all of that and for 179 dollars for a dedicated router with no you know wireless functionality and no real switch functionality um it is kind of pricey for that but for the functionality it provides it's amazing now if you don't want to do any of that advanced stuff just go with the generic netgear asus linksys router and you'll be good to go and you'll probably stop watching the video now the sg 1100 is their entry-level router system and it's pretty much designed for small home labs which is what i'm running so it's perfect for me now mine's actually doing a bunch of stuff let's start out with the most basic thing the most basic functionality that your router is going to provide and act as your dhcp server which is basically meaning that your router is passing out ip addresses to every device on your internet a couple of more advanced things like setting up vlans this is where the 1100 shines and running pf sense on the 1100 makes it super super easy to do these more advanced things now i'm running two separate vlans one for my main network which contains basically everything that i personally use in my home network and then i have a separate vlan that i named guest and this is essentially for anybody that comes over and wants to use a guest network and it houses all of my iot devices and smart home stuff and the reason for separating that is because i don't want to have my iot devices or my smart home devices be able to talk to my main network stuff so my home server my nas any personal uh computers that we have on the network i don't want there to be any possibility of some security breach and i know you guys hear a lot about in the news you know you know ring devices people talking through your ring network and certain you know iot devices getting compromised and if that happens all of those live on a separate vlan so i don't have to worry about that i'm also using pf sense to run h.a proxy which is a reverse proxy that allows me to take certain devices within my home network and expose them to the internet and the outside world it's useful for certain things like cloud services if you want to run plex stuff vpns anything you want to expose to the outside internet uh ha proxy does a very good job at that along with those things pf sense is also acting as a certificate authority so that i can enable https on any devices or services that i want to expose to the internet and i'm doing this with the help of cloudflare so cloudflare is acting as kind of a middleman between my network and the outside internet and for some reason they provide a bunch of useful services for free so i recommend go and check out cloudflare you can play around with it for free and do a lot of cool things with it on top of all that stuff you know you're getting your generic stuff like dhcp port forwarding firewalls and a whole handful of things i could spend hours talking about all the features of pf sense and using the netgear mecure netgate sg 1100 but there are more components in my network that i want to get to okay the switch your switch is basically acting as a hub to all of your devices and that is if you're running a bunch of hard-line devices meaning that you have a bunch of computers that you don't want to use wi-fi with you want a hardline network cable directly into that machine you're probably going to need a switch because most routers these days come with about four plugs and if you have four computers that's fine but if you have more and you're wanting to do more sophisticated things you're probably going to need a dedicated switch so switch i chose is a qnap qsw 4 0 8 4 c that really rolls off the tongue right and the reason i went with this is because of its price to features is probably the best you're gonna find for a small network setup like mine it's about 300 but what it does do is it comes with four dedicated 10 gigabit rj45 ports and this is perfect for me because it allows me to do everything i need and gives me a little more wiggle room if i ever want to upgrade down the line because my server is running a 10 gig connection and my main pc is running a 10 gig connection that's only two so i have two left over if i ever want to expand in the future and the switch also comes with eight dedicated one gig ports another solid feature of this switch is that it supports vlans okay wireless access points i have actually two dedicated wireless access points to allow wi-fi my main wireless access point is a netgear r 6700 b2 it's a router i've been using for about four or so years and it runs perfectly now stripped most of the features out of it before it was acting as a router switch and access point but now since i have the sg 1100 and the qnap the 6700 is basically just an access point but why do i have two why do you need two access points well the second one is another netgear but it is the ac 1200 and this is a dedicated wireless access point so why do i have two access points well when i was setting up vlans it was convenient to have a dedicated access point act as my guest network you know access point and one access point to act as my main access point whenever i want to connect things within my home network to the main vlan i connect to the 6700 and everything on the guest vlan goes directly through the 1200 and that is also where i've connected my home security and iot devices and then at the very end of the chain we have these asus 10 gigabit cards now depending on the motherboard and devices you use a lot don't really come with 10 gig built in so you may need to purchase a dedicated 10 gig card but i have one of these running in my main computer and i also had a second one running in my server but since upgrading i'll leave a link to that video above uh that motherboard now has dual 10 gigabit ports built in so i actually have an extra one of these that is not being used this is about a hundred dollars i recommend it i know there are cheaper ones out there but this had a lot of good reviews in terms of using it with windows and linux and i wasn't necessarily sure of my use case yet so this is what i went with and no real complaints works perfectly so that's the hardware setup that i'm using basically i get the internet from my isp through the modem my router takes that connection and does all the fancy stuff with it like assigns ip addresses to all my devices using dhcp it acts as a vlan so my network is basically split up in two separate parts another thing i forgot to mention is that my router is also acting and hosting a vpn so that anywhere in the world i can vpn back into my home network and access anything on my home network as if i were actually here then from the router that connection goes directly to the switch where the switch takes that connection and basically makes a hard line connection to all the devices that i have hardwired and then the access points are also making direct connections to the switch and then broadcasting that signal throughout the house and depending on which device i'm using will determine which access point i connect to and everything's all happy so you know what let's actually go take a look at everything i'm running okay so this is my dedicated network room with a built-in washer dryer and a washer dryer is probably the most important part of a network uh physical room because if any of the devices mess up you can just grab it throw it in the washer and you're good to go okay actually uh this is my laundry room which doubles as my network uh hub i guess you could say and this is where all the magic happens so like i said before we have our modem which comes from spectrum or your isp and just sits there and does it's one thing um here is the brains this is the net gate i can't really pull it out because of all the wiring that's so neatly tucked in behind but this is the netgate sg 1100 and it's pretty tiny and it's not the size of the router in the network it's the size of the network and the router okay so the router then goes to the switch and this is our qnap qs408 4c something whatever here's the switch and that you can see all these beautiful uh cat6a cables which i don't recommend because they're paying in the ass to crimp and terminate but that's running directly on the switch and those go up into the attic and to all the rooms in the house to give me some nice hardwired 10 gig connections and then from there you will see the access point so here is the ac 1200 which is the guest network and this is the quite dusty um b2 and that's the setup it's not really that exciting there's a couple of lights going on and you're probably wondering what this is this is my backup sync thing server i'm gonna leave a link to that video above if you want to check it out but that backs up all my files if you're interested and oh there's a ups so i recommend having a ups in your network set up so that when the power flickers your entire network doesn't go down so that's it um it's not that exciting the i think the most exciting part is the washer dryer but okay back to the office okay so not too exciting right i mean that's basically my networking setup it's just sitting in my laundry room and kind of doing its thing and it's all just sitting there running and that's kind of it but if anywhere in the process i went into something that you have specific questions about like setting up a vpn um setting up vlan setting up reverse proxies uh handling certificates for https uh let me know i'd be more than happy to make a video going into more detail about those things especially if there are some of you out there that really want to learn how to do this and want to utilize it in your home setup so that's all i have for you today uh leave a comment below on what your home networking setup looks like uh let me know if it's more complicated or more simple than what i'm running but if you like this video be sure to drop a like below if you're a fan of the channel and these types of videos be sure to subscribe it really helps me a ton and i will see you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 16,681

Rating: 4.8939395 out of 5

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Id: _cDEdjDGP8w

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sun May 09 2021