As a younger person in my career I got a few Cisco certs, the study material was available to me, and I thought it would be an interesting thing to learn. At this point, I have had a CCNP for almost 10 years and I still enjoy messing with networking even if it is not my day to day job. While I historically have used Cisco a lot, there are many other brands out there these days that have good gear, some even low power enough that I can run at home and not worry about the power bill. Below is my current home setup, it has changed a lot over time, and this is more of a snapshot than a proper design document. That is what homelabs are for right? Messing around with things.

Firewall

The firewall I am running is one I have mentioned on here before. The system itself is an OLD Dell Optiplex 990, released in early 2011 and soon to have its 10th birthday! Idling at ~30 watts, it works well for what I need it to with a gen 2 i7, and 8gb of ram. I added a 4 port Intel gigabit ethernet card to it, which allows for more ports and hardware offloading of a lot of IP tasks.

I looked around at different firewall OS options. Pfsense is the obvious one, but I found its interface lacking. (I use Palo Alto Networks firewalls at work and that interface/flow is more what I am used to) Opnsense is a bit better, but still leaves something to be desired on the UI side. Then I tried a Home License of Sophos XG. It is free as long as you stay at 4 cores or less, with 6 or less GB of ram used; you are given an “evaluation license” until 2099-12-31, if it runs out I will ask for an extension. For more than a year I have been enjoying it, the interface is slick, and you get the enterprise auto patching built in. In the time I have run it, I have had 1 zero-day attack on the product and it was immediately patched without me having to login. I use it as my home firewall between vlans, a DHCP server, and I also have IPSec and SSL VPNs for when I am away from home. The system does DNS for the house (on the less secure vlans, AD does those) and allows for block lists to be used. This is like a pihole but built into the product.

There are a few things it does a little odd, but I enjoy not having to go and write weird config files on the backend of some Linux/BSD to have my firewall work. I have it hooked into AD for auth, and that way I can login with a domain admin, and allow users who have domain accounts to VPN into home. It has been VERY stable, and usually only reboots when I tell it to do an update, or that one time the ~10 year old PC blew a power supply.

Cross Room Link

At the start of the year, I was running a Ubiquiti Wi-Fi mesh at home, it got decent speeds, and allowed me to not run wires over the apartment. The access points used were these models, link. They were only 2×2 802.11AC Wave 1; got decent speeds (around 400mbps), but being in a New York City apartment, I would get interference sometimes, even on 5ghz. The interferences would cause issues when playing games or transferring files. The bigger issue was my desk with a bunch of computers, and the firewall were on different sides of this link, meaning any data that was on a different vlan had to go over and back on this Wi-Fi link. On top of that, I will mention I basically HAVE to use 5ghz, I did a site survey with one of the APs and the LOWEST used 2.4ghz band near me was 79% utilized…

Anyway I started looking around for what I would replace it with, I always thought fiber could be a way to go since its small and if I could get white jackets on it, then it would blend in with the wall. I spend a few weeks emailing and calling different vendors trying to find someone who would do a single cable run of white jacketed fiber. Keep in mind this is early 2020 with Covid starting up. Lots of places could not do orders of 1, or their website would say they could and later they would say they couldn’t and refund me. Finally I found blackbox.com, I have no affiliation with them they just did the job quickly and I appreciate that. I got a 50 meter or so run, and was able to install that with the switches below.

Switches

Now that I had the fiber I needed some small switches I could run at home. After looking at what others have on reddit and www.servethehome.com I found the Ruckus ICX 7150-C12P. A 14 1gb/s ethernet, switch with 2 1/10gb SFP+ ports. The switch is compact, fan-less, and has 150 watts of POE! I can run access points, and cameras off of it without other power supplies. I have learned to look for before buying this sort of gear off eBay to try to get the newest firmware. With Cisco and HPe they love to put it behind a wall that requires an active support contract. Not only does Ruckus NOT do that, they have firmware available for their APs that allows it to run without a controller, more on that later.

I ended up buying 1 of the Ruckus switches “used” but it came sealed in box. Then getting another one broken, after seeing some people online mention they sometimes over heat if it was somewhere without proper ventilation and that can kill their power supply. The unit is fan-less, but the tradeoff there is nothing can sit on top of it, because it needs to vent. I was able to get one for around $40, then a new power supply for $30, all in I spend $70 for a layer 3 switch with 10gb ports! Now I have these 2 units on opposite sides of the room, in a switch stack. This way they act as one and I only need to manage “one switch”.

With the Ubiquiti gear no longer acting as a Wi-Fi link, which I have written about before, I only had one of the APs running. As mentioned before the access point was only 2×2 antennas and 802.11AC Wave 1. I was pondering getting a new Wi-Fi 6 access point, while looking around someone on reddit, again, suggested looking at Ruckus access points. Their antenna design is very good, and with their “Unleashed” firmware you get similar features to running a Ubiquiti controller. After looking at the prices I had to decide if I wanted to go Ubiquiti with Wi-Fi 6, and wait for their access points to come out, or get something equally priced but more enterprise level like a 802.11AC Wave 2 access point (like a Ruckus R510 or R610 off eBay).

I recently had a bad experience with some Ubiquiti firmware, then all of a sudden they killed Ubiquiti Video with very little warning, and some the more advanced functions I would want to do are either minimally or not documented with Ubiquiti. One could argue that I am used to enterprise gear, and Ubiquiti is more “pro-sumer” than enterprise; thus, I should not be upset at the lack of enterprise features. That made me decide to try something new. I ended up getting a Ruckus R610 off eBay and loading the “Unleashed” firmware on it. I can say the speeds and coverage is much better than the older access point. It is 3×3 802.11AC Wave 2, and with most of my devices still being 802.11AC I figured that was a good call.

One feature of the Unleashed firmware is it can manage all your Ruckus hardware. The web management portal has a place to attach your switches as well, and do some management of them there. I have been scared to do this, and coming from a traditional CLI switch management background have yet to do so.

I was able to POE boot the AP just like I did with Ubiquiti, converting the firmware was easy, and there are many guides on Youtube for it. The UI does not have the same polish that Ubiquiti does, but the controller is in the AP itself which is very nice. There is a mobile app, but it is fairly simplistic. The web interface allows for auto updating, and can natively connect to Active Directory making it very easy to manage authentication.

There are 3 wireless networks in the home, 1 is the main one for guests, with their 6 year old unpatched android phones, that has a legacy name and meh password, that way I don’t have to reset some smart light switches Wi-Fi settings. This is where all the IoT junk lives. There is one with a better password that connects to the same vlan I am slowly moving things in the house over to, at least the key is more secure. Then there is the X wireless network, this one is not broadcast and has 802.1X on it. When a user authenticates with their domain creds, depending on the user and device I send them to a different vlan. This is mostly used for trusted devices like our laptops, and iPad when I want to do management things. This network for my domain account allows me on the management network.

10gb/s Upgrade!

The latest upgrade I have embarked on was 10gb/s. I moved my active VM storage off of the NAS to Storage Spaces Direct for perf. While the NAS has worked well for years, the 7 – 3 TB disks do not give fantastic IOPS when different VMs are doing a lot of transactions. After lots of thought and trials I went with Storage Spaces Direct and will write about it later. The main concern was that it allows all the hypervisors to have shared storage and keep it in sync, and to do that they need good interconnects. This setup is the definition of, lab-do-not-do-in-prod, with 3 nodes each with 3 SSDs over USB 3. I knew with USB 3 my theoretical bottle neck was 5gb/s, which is much better than the 1gb/s I had, that also had to be shared with all server and other traffic.

First I had to decide how I would layout the 10gb/s network, while the ICX 7150 has 2 – 10gb/s ports, 1 is in use to go between the switches. After looking around and comparing my needs/wants/power/loudness-the-significant-other-would-put-up-with I got a MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+IN. I wasn’t super excited to use them, since their security history is not fantastic, but I didn’t want to pay a ton or have a loud switch. I run the switch with the layer 2 firmware, and then put its management interface on a cut off vlan, that way it is very limited on what it can do.

After that I got a HP 10gb/s server cards, and tried a Solarflare S7120. Each had their ups and downs, the HPs are long and would not fit into some of the slim desktops I had. But when the would work, like in the Dells, they would work right away without issues. The Solarflare are shorter cards which is nice, but most of them ship with a firmware that will not work on some motherboards or newer operating systems. For these you need to find a system they work in, boot to Windows (perhaps an older version) then flash them with a tool off their website. After that they work great. I upgraded the 3 main hypervisors, and the NAS. I have seen the hypervisors hit 6.1gb/s when syncing Storage Spaces. With memory caching I can get over the rated disk speed.

That is the general layout of the network at this point. I am using direct attached cables for most of the systems. I did order some “genuine” Cisco 10gb/s SFP+ off Amazon for ~$20, I didn’t believe they would be real, but I had someone I know who works at Cisco look them up and they are real. Old stock shipped to Microsoft in 2012 or so, but genuine parts. The Ruckus switches and these NICs do not care which brand the SFPs are, so I figured I would get one I knew. The newer Intel NICs will not work with non Intel SFPs so look out.

To summarize, the everything comes in from my ISP to the Sophos XG box, then that connects to a port on one of the Ruckus switches. Those two Ruckus switches have a fiber link between them. Then one of the SFP+ ports on the Ruckus switch goes to a SFP+ port in the MikroTik switch. All the hypervisors hang off that MikroTik switch with SFP+ DACs. Desktops, video game consoles, and APs all attach to 1gb/s ethernet ports on the Ruckus switches. I have tried my best to label all the ports as best I can to make managing everything easier. I’m sure this will evolve more with time, but for my apartment now 10gb/s networking with a Ruckus R610 AP has been working very well.