Here’s Rack Sparrow (sorry for the dad joke):
PDU
Ubiquiti UDM Se
Ubiquiti 24-port patch panel
Raspberry Pi running HA, Lutron and IKEA Bridges
U7 Pro, G4 Pro and Chime as well

I started planning a couple weeks ago and asked if I should get a switch (most of you guys said no)

What do you all think? What should I build out next?

I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max, and whenever I put it on my Anker 3-in-1 wireless charger, the ping goes crazy for everyone on the network.
If I take it off the charger or turn off Wi-Fi on the phone, everything goes back to normal. Charging with a regular cable doesn’t cause any issues.
Has anyone had this problem before?

Hey everyone, I’m in Italy and looking at a 10G FTTH plan on the FiberCop network (XGS-PON, through a reseller). The estimated speed at my address is 8.8 Gbps, and I’m going for it because it costs almost the same as the 2.5G plan, so I might as well take the headroom. I want to use my own router instead of the ISP’s, and they said they’d give me the PPPoE login and the VLAN tag. I haven’t ordered anything yet, so I’m trying to pick the router first.

Right now I’m torn between two. The first is the GL.iNet Flint 4: it has a 10G RJ45, a 10G SFP+ and 2.5G ports, with Wi-Fi 7 built in, and it goes on sale now and then for around €325. The second is the Banana Pi BPI-R4 bundle, with 2 x 10G SFP+ and 4 x 1G RJ45, which costs €389 right now. The listing says “dual-band” but also mentions a Wi-Fi 7 module.

What I’m after is two 10G ports, one for WAN and one straight to my PC (I have a free PCIe x4 slot for a 10G card), decent Wi-Fi 7 for a two floor house, and something stable enough that my family doesn’t complain when it acts up.

A few things I can’t figure out:

• Can the Flint 4 do PPPoE + VLAN close to full 10G with acceleration on? And how much does SQM hurt it?
• If my ONT ends up with a 10G RJ45 port, can the BPI-R4 handle it with SFP+ copper modules? Do they overheat, and which ones actually work?
• Does the BPI-R4 bundle really come with the BE14 Wi-Fi module and the antennas? And how’s OpenWrt on that board right now?
• Is there something better with two native 10G RJ45 ports (Xiaomi BE19000 Pro, TP-Link Archer BE800)?

Any firmware problems I should know about before buying either one? Thanks.

Hi all!

I'm trying to run a fiber cable from one house to another so I have internet here. Ideally buried to protect it from the elements. (200 meters give or take)

Which cable would you all recommend for this?

As well as, what sort of protective conduit should it be placed inside to protect the cable?

RJ45 is out of the question due to the distance.

I've been out of the computer world for years now, and fiber optics is just not something I'm familiar with. Would also not want to blatantly trust AI info for this.

TIA

New apartment has this network enclosure. My modem & router are on the opposite side of the apartment. I was hoping to be able to plug a cable from my router into the wall jack in that room and have this thing distribute to the other rooms but that doesn’t seem to be working.

I'm not a network guy but feels like the other half the strands on these should be connected too? Each white cable is labeled with room names, so I assume this was at least *run* to each.

title says it all. Need to cut and reroute 5 cables. Which would cause less issues with 2.5gb running through entire house?

(Ground Floor and 1st Floor are the same layout)

Hi all, I am looking at what non destructive options I have for the going between floors and into neighbouring rooms.

My original idea was to drop an ethernet cable between the interior wall with a port on either side however, this is a 1930's house so I presume it's solid brick and I don't feel like carving the wall out.

Another Idea is to drop a Fibre Optic Cable through the corner of the 1st floor room into the ceiling corner of the room below it then through the wall to the room with the router. How does that sound for an idea?

From the 900mbps connection using powerline only gives me around 90mbps using a AV600 TP Link. So not sure this is an option however I know there is the AV2000 with MIMO that might be better.

WiFi on my Phone (PC doesn't have WiFi) I am getting around 100mbps. So slightly better. I am wondering if it is worth getting a PCIe WiFi Card for the PC.

I am looking to game on the PC so a decent connection is wanted.

No coaxial port for MOCA unfortunately.

Any other ideas/suggestions?

Any decent companies within the West Midlands area that could provide some solutions?

The TLDR is my fiber service recently switched over to Quantum Fiber and I can't get my RT-AX11000 to work with it anymore ( it was working flawless when it was still going through CenturyLink ). Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I believe the problem is the VLAN 201 tagging requirement, which I don't think the AX11000 can do. So I'm asking for advice and feedback on what I can do to solve this so I'm not stuck with the ISP's own router.

In more detail : My fiber service used to be through CenturyLink. My primary router is an Asus RT-AX11000 ( regular, non-Pro model ) and it was working just fine. Recently the service has completely shifted over to Quantum Fiber and my router has stopped working. I had a tech come out and they switched out the ONT to a newer Q1000K model, but still my AX11000 won't connect to the ISP. I know Quantum Fiber needs a VLAN ID of 201, and I've set that in the IPTV section of the AX11000's settings, but I've also done some searching that says the AX11000 doesn't support VLAN tagging the WAN port so it won't work anyway.

So the main question I have is whether I can get one of my existing routers to work or if I need to get a new one. I don't care about the "latest and greatest" things, 6 GHz wireless, or anything like that. My home isn't terribly large and I don't need a mesh system to keep things connected. However, I do have a few devices I need accessible from outside and I rather like the DDNS features on the AX11000 that automatically register a sub-domain and get an SSL cert ( I understand many Asus routers have this ). I typically have 20 - 25 devices on the network through a mix of hard line and Wi-Fi.

So here are the options I have right now:

1. Use the RT-AX11000 - I'd love to keep using this if I can because I really don't want to set up another router, transfer my DHCP device list, parental controls and filtering, etc. I don't know if flashing Merlin onto the router will solve the VLAN tagging or not. It seems it might do if I use Merlin and some third-party mods, but it would be nice if someone can confirm this. I've also read that the AX11000 is capable of VLAN tagging, but it's something that has to be changed by SSHing in and changing some files since the option isn't exposed anywhere in the GUI. Again, if anyone can confirm that, it'd be great.
2. Repurpose my RT-AC68W - I currently have this flashed with FreshTomato and am using it as a wireless bridge for multiple devices. I'm just starting to dig around in the mountains of menus that is FreshTomato to see if this is possible.
3. Use an RT-BE90 - I may be able to get one of these for free. I know it has the DDNS capabilities I want, but I'm not sure about the VLAN tagging ( some searches say it can, some say only the BE92 can do that ). I don't like that it only has three Ethernet ports since my house is wired with more than that, but it's something I can work around. But if it does work, I could replace my AC68 with the AX11000. And since both the AX11000 and BE90 are tri-band, I could set it up as a mesh with dedicated backtalk channel instead of just a wireless bridge. As said, I don't really need a mesh system to cover my house, but it might be a nice upgrade to have for the future.

If none of the options above will work, then can you steer me to different option that will? Maybe there's some other configuration trick I don't know about, or just a different router model to look at.

Thanks.

Hey y’all! I’ve been on workers’ comp for a couple of weeks, and I’m not sure if this is boredom, me contemplating a career change, or a little bit of both 😂. Since I’m not very mobile right now, I decided to dive into the homelab hobby.
Current setup:
2× Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q i5 8th Gen
● 40GB RAM

● 512GB NVMe + 512GB SSD

● 2.5GbE NIC

● One has an HBA card

1× Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q i7 8th Gen

● 40GB RAM

● 1TB NVMe

● 2.5GbE NIC

What I originally planned:

● i7: Main Proxmox server running Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Immich, Nextcloud, Technitium, NetBird, OPNsense, and other open-source services.

● i5 #1: Proxmox for SOC, IAM, cybersecurity, and other lab environments.

● i5 #2 + HBA: TrueNAS SCALE bare metal with my two 8TB HDDs.

Now I’m realizing TrueNAS can run VMs and containers, so I’m reconsidering the whole layout.
What would y’all do?

● Move the HBA into the i7 and make it the main TrueNAS/virtualization server?

● Run one dedicated TrueNAS machine and one dedicated Proxmox cybersecurity lab machine?

● Or keep the original three-node setup?
Also, what open-source programs/services are y’all running in your homelabs that you’d recommend?

I have spectrum fiber and using the spectrum equipment. Recently finished a shed conversion for an office 200' away, used a cat6 Ethernet run directly into the spectrum router and speeds are limited to 100. Any ideas on why the speeds are limited. Tried a different cable with no change.

I'm confused about something and I was hoping someone here would clear it up. I've always read people favor manual forward porting over upnp for security. From my understanding, upnp opens the ports you need at the moment and closes them later on when they are not in use. Seem practical and safe to me. Forward porting assigns ports to a static ip but those ports stay open until you close them. Isn't that a bigger security risk for someone like me who needs a bunch of ports open for different games? The only downside I see to upnp is that it's dynamic. What am I really risking with upnp? Do unwanted malicious sites request ports that upnp would automatically allow? If so then is it still safer to manual forward a bunch of ports and leave them open all the time? I mostly need ports for games because it opens the nat type from moderate. Seems the preference of forward porting is more about control than security unless there's something I'm missing about how vulnerable upnp really is. Thanks from noob.

Based in the UK; I'm on Hyperoptic 1Gb symmetrical with the Nokia Hyperhub (HA-140W-B). I upload large video files for work (about 3-6 GB final exports) and they keep crawling at around 5 Mbps. Speed tests look completely normal.

So far, I've tested:
- Multi-connection speed tests (Ookla, Waveform) are fine: around 500 down / 550 up, bufferbloat grade B.

- Single-connection uploads (curl uploading a 25 MB file to speed.cloudflare.com) are either fast or stuck, with nothing in between:
Over Wi-Fi: 10, 465, 9, 10, 346, 9 Mbps
Wired directly to the Hyperhub, Wi-Fi off: 4, 3, 3, 3 Mbps

- It's the same on IPv4 and IPv6, so I don't believe it's an IPv6 routing issue.

I also tried fixing my 5 GHz channel to a less congested one and it was the same. I still get around 7 Mbps through the Cloudflare WARP too.

So any single connection seems to have a chance of being capped at a max of 10 Mbps, but tests that open lots of connections seem to hide it? Does that make sense?

My Hyperhub's WAN port doesn't connect to a normal wall socket, but rather into a Ruckus wall unit of some kind. I've tried using the spare ports on the unit too and I can't get a connection.

I've raised it with Hyperoptic support and I'm waiting to hear back. Has anyone else seen this? What did it turn out to be and any ideas on how long it took to fix?

I've just never really seen situations where single speed connection would be 100x slower than the multi connection one.

I have the Sky SR203 with the landline running from it. I want to get a second router and use this is my wireless hub for better range and multiple networks.

I will disable the WiFi on the sky hub connect the two via Ethernet.

What is the best router for my needs?

Ive been watching videos and reading on Reddit about UniFi vs TP link and what not but it’s been a month of going back and forth in my head so I figured I’d just post something. Main questions at the bottom

I work in IT and have a desire to learn more about networking topics because I don’t do it myself at work but but deal with networking all the time. So I would like to understand things more. Like setting up different VLANs, firewall rules, looking at traffic, inbound/outbound internet rules, etc.

Based on things I have been reading it seems like go with UniFi if you want to have something stable (which is important to me I don’t want to troubleshoot things at work all day just to come home and figure out why my WiFi isn’t working on any random day) and go with opnsense/own hardware if you want to learn networking.

Questions:
- Is UniFi too simple to make you understand networking topics?
- If my desire to learn networking is higher than the hopefully my desire to not deal with things breaking at home should I go with my own hardware? I would think the amount of times something breaks would be infrequent but it’s still a thought I have
- Is being vendor locked as “suffocating” as it sounds or is it not that big of a deal?

Hi, I have been using a Linksys 4850, with solid performance since buying/installing ~6 years ago, never needed to change any configurations since install. Now, I find myself having to change the password for the network. Only issue is none of the normal ways you’re supposed to access the admin areas, work for me now. For context, I had a different computer than I do now, so I’m told the router may not recognize my IP address. I have a 2021 MacBook Pro. I had a 2008 MacBook Pro. I used to use Safari or Mozilla. Now I use Brave, but for this exercise, I begrudgingly returned to Safari (Brave apparently is not supported). I tried the 168.1.1 and my local.router as the instructions all say. Does anyone have a work around for this?

I should add that Cisco is telling me they had ended support for this model.

I am running 2x MT-6000 with openWRT installed + RE315 repeater that is mounted in the attic to connect to my devices in the attic. I am in Texas and it gets hot.
No problem with the summer heat and my RE315 or the wireless plugs I have installed in the attic and it has been several years with the most recent summer being the hottest. I needed a way to turn this plug on/off without having to go up in the attic and manually do it.

[pfSense] ---> [MT-6000] ---> [RE315] ---> wireless plugs

Onto the problem.
I recently observed on the pfSense ARP table, the RE315 forwarding its MAC and hiding all the MAC addresses of the devices behind it. This is creating a problem with MAC based firewall rules so I need to replace the RE315 and possible the MT-6000s.

I was thinking about buying a couple of Ubiquiti U7 Pro XGS to mount on the ceiling to replace the MT-6000s and RE315 but it doesn't solve the issue of needing coverage of the devices in the attic.

How would you guys solve this problem?

My mobile plan in Turkey has unlimited on-device data but a separate 30 GB hotspot allowance. I connect my MacBook to my iPhone’s Personal Hotspot.
I set up Tailscale with the iPhone acting as the exit node for the Mac. Since then, my remaining hotspot allowance has stayed at exactly 22.35 GB for two days despite downloads on the Mac. Overall mobile data usage continues to increase. The carrier’s counters normally update within 2–3 hours.
However, I once noticed that Tailscale was off on the iPhone, and the hotspot allowance still seemed unchanged. I’m not certain how much traffic I used during that period, so I may have misinterpreted it.
I also previously experimented with setting the Mac’s outgoing IPv4 TTL to 65, which could be another variable. It didn’t work back then though, without tailscale installed.

I’m trying to understand the mechanism rather than assume Tailscale caused it. How would you distinguish between a routing-related effect, TTL-based classification, and a carrier accounting issue? What measurements would help establish what’s actually happening?

Hi all! I'm moving from FTTC to FTTH (Italy, ONT with a 2.5 Gbps LAN port) and redesigning my home network. I'm not a network expert, so my priority is a simple, low-maintenance setup that is still secure. I'd really appreciate a sanity check before buying everything. Floor plan attached.

Context

• ~100 m² apartment, brick walls. ONT and router location (S0, living room) is fixed.
• All wall jacks are Cat6 UTP: each jack (S1–S5) runs back to the wall plate at S0.
• Heavy smart working (Teams, SharePoint, cloud Office): stable upload is the top priority, with TV streaming at the same time. No online gaming, no landline.
• ISP not chosen yet; I'll ask for a separate ONT and a public IPv4.

1. Connected devices

2. Final wiring

ONT (2.5G) ── UniFi Dream Router 7 (WAN 2.5G RJ45, at S0)
               ├─ SFP+ as WAN2: optional 4G/5G failover router
               └─ LAN 2.5G ── UniFi Flex 2.5G PoE (S0)
                    ├─ p1 PoE → S3 → U7 Lite AP (main bedroom)
                    ├─ p2 PoE → S5 → Flex Mini 2.5G (study, PoE-powered)
                    │              ├─ p1 Home mini PC        [Home]
                    │              ├─ p2 Monitor RJ45 → work laptop via TB4  [Work]
                    │              └─ p3 Printer             [Home]
                    ├─ p3 PoE → S2 → Reolink camera          [IoT]
                    ├─ p4 → S1 → Smart TV                    [IoT]
                    ├─ p5 → S4 → Kids' PC                    [Home]
                    └─ p6 → NAS (future)                     [Home]

UPS (APC BX950MI-GR) powers only ONT + UDR7 + PoE switch
(~50 W total, goal: ≥1 h of internet for work during outages)

The UDR7 covers the living room, kitchen and study; the U7 Lite covers the bedrooms. There is no AP in the kids' room on purpose.

3. Hardware

• Router: UniFi Dream Router 7 (UDR7)
• Main switch: UniFi Flex 2.5G PoE (USW-Flex-2.5G-8-PoE) with its AC adapter
• Study switch: UniFi Flex Mini 2.5G, powered via PoE
• AP: UniFi U7 Lite, PoE from the Flex 2.5G PoE (the UDR7's PoE port is 802.3af only)
• UPS: APC Back-UPS BX950MI-GR
• Study desk: Dell U3225QE monitor with built-in KVM, shared between the work laptop (single TB4 cable) and an ASUS NUC 15 Pro+ (Core Ultra 7 255H, 2x16 GB, 1 TB). Keyboard, mouse and webcam sit on the monitor's USB hub.

4. VLANs

• Firewall (zone-based): IoT gets its own zone. Home → IoT is allowed (with return traffic), IoT → Internal is blocked, IoT → Internet is allowed. Work, Guest and Kids use "Isolate network".
• SSIDs: Home on 2.4/5/6 GHz. Work on 2.4/5 GHz. IoT on 2.4 GHz only, WPA2, with Enhanced IoT Connectivity on and the old SSID and password reused so devices reconnect without re-pairing. Kids on 2.4/5 GHz with an on/off toggle and a schedule. Guest on 5 GHz only. That keeps it to 4 SSIDs per band.
• Other: mDNS on Home + IoT (for casting to the TV), IPS on, UPnP off, fixed IPs for the printer and NAS, remote access only via the built-in WireGuard VPN, automatic updates at night.

Questions

1. Is this too complex for a beginner? Anything you would simplify?
2. Will UDR7 at S0 + U7 Lite at S3 cover this layout through brick walls, including the balcony where the Blink camera sits?
3. Any known issues running Mitsubishi (MELCloud), Netatmo/Legrand, Alexa, Blink or Reolink on an isolated IoT VLAN behind the zone-based firewall?
4. Dell U3225QE KVM: does the monitor's built-in NIC follow the KVM switch? My plan is to disable that USB NIC on the home PC so it never lands on the Work VLAN. Is that enough?
5. Is the UPS sizing reasonable for ~50 W and 1 hour of runtime?
6. Anything important I've missed?
7. Feel free toi suggest different manufactureres or models for network components.

Even if the post seems very detailed, I confirm I am not an expert as this will be my very first network with such detailed features, I just used Claude to help me in defining a good configuration and selection of components. But I prefer to have some "human opinion" and suggestions.

Thanks a lot!

Edit: Thank you to everyone who bothered to answer! I will be switching to OPNSense next time my IPFire dies. After a quick research, pfSense CE didn't seem worth it compared to OPNSense.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Hi. I was wondering if anyone knew any good alternative firewall systems for x64 bit pc to run. I have 250M fiber and sometimes host a web server and a minecraft server open to the internet. I have been using IPfire for some time but it tends to have really hard to understand documentation as well as a frustrating upgrade distribution systeṃ. What would be a good replacement? Requirements to have:

- Easy-to-understand documentation and ui
- OpenVPN/Wireguard support
- IP blocklist or similar to mitigate automated bruteforce attack attempts
- Actively maintained (Preferably oss, but not a hard requirement), with opt-in only diagnostic pings

Nice plus would be if it has easy connection monitoring and data usage monitor.

If you have any inexpensive, quality devices that might serve the same thing i would be glad to hear those as well! If there's something i should add, feel free to ask.

Thanks in advance!