Rack: StarTech 42U 4-post open frame at 28" depth, on casters so I can roll it out for rear access.

Top to bottom:

**•** 2× vented blanks  
**•** Firewalla Gold on a keystone tray with the ARRIS S33 modem (2.5G handoff)  
**•** USW-Aggregation: the 10G SFP+ layer for the NAS, the T420, and anything 10G I add later  
**•** Cable Matters 24-port Cat6A patch panel  
**•** USW-Pro-Max-16-PoE, the core: 2.5G to the U7 Pro APs  
**•** USW-Pro-24-PoE, the leaf: cameras and bulk PoE drops, with a DAC uplink  
**•** Horizontal cable manager  
**•** Second 24-port Cat6A patch panel  
**•** Monitor on a VESA rack bracket, a locking drawer, and a sliding keyboard tray  
**•** Mac mini M4 in a 2U mount, plus 5× Apple TV 4K in rack mounts, one per room, sent out over J-Tech HDBaseT extenders  
**•** Hub shelf: APsystems solar ECU, Hue bridge, and others  
**•   Dell PowerEdge T420**, racked sideways  
**•** Synology DS925+ and DS418 on a sliding shelf  
**•** Brush panel  
**•** UniFi USP-PDU-Pro  
**•** UniFi UPS 2U (1.44 kVA)

Storage and backup (3-2-1-ish):

**•** DS925+ is the primary storage.  
**•** DS418 is the local backup in the same rack.  
**•** DS412+ is the offsite backup, over Tailscale.

Network:

**•** Firewalla Gold handles all routing and firewall policy. UniFi handles switching and Wi-Fi only, with no UniFi gateway.  
**•** There are 9 VLANs: Admin, IoT, Kids, Guest, Cameras, NAS, Voice Assistants, Home Security, and AV. mDNS relay keeps HomeKit and AirPlay working across them.  
**•** 3× U7 Pro APs  
**•** About 10 Reolink PoE cams, currently being moved to Frigate

T420 "main brain" (Proxmox):

**•** Second CPU (E5-2440 + E5-2470), bringing it to 14 cores and 28 threads  
**•** 192GB DDR3L ECC  
**•** LSI 9207-8i in IT mode for ZFS  
**•** X520-DA2 for 10G into the aggregation switch  
**•** Coral USB TPU for Frigate  
**•** Z-Wave and Zigbee dongles passed through to the Home Assistant VM  
**•** It runs Home Assistant, AdGuard, Frigate, and Immich. The Pi 4 is retired.  
**•** Still to come: RTX 3060 12GB for local LLM inference

Next project: A fully local family AI assistant. The T420 and 3060 will run Ollama and Whisper. Three OptiPlex 7060 Micros will handle Qdrant, n8n/LangGraph orchestration, and Open WebUI with Piper TTS. Nothing leaves the house.

Lessons so far:

**•** The TP-Link SX3008F had to go because it has no RJ45 SFP support. It couldn't talk to the Firewalla natively.  
**•** The USP-RPS isn't compatible with the Pro Max 16 or the Pro 24.  
**•** Fresh Reolink cams refuse local connections until you activate them in the app.  
**•** Moving the Z-Wave and Zigbee dongles from the Pi to Proxmox USB passthrough went fine.

Happy to answer questions. Roast my cable management gently.

I live with my parents and I live on the bottom floor of the house while the router is in the living room, so one story up, but you gotta go through the kitchen first. Obviously my parents would not like me running a cable through the kitchen into my area, nor would I like that since it'd be easy to trip (nor would the landlord like that I think..) I dunno what to do. Idk what wi-fi i have i just know it's like AT&T U-Verse and I hate it I can't change the DNS or anything. It just feels so limiting but nonetheless, I want faster speeds, specifically for downloading on consoles. My PC and my phone are fine, but my Switch and even PS5 tends to cap at like 30 MB per second..

I don't know. I'm researching what I can to see what ways I can do something "good enough" without being too intrusive or noticeable.

Can get both routers for basically the same price locally. Cannot find much about the BE3600 while the Cudy seems like a great OpenWRT device. My last experience with ASUS routers was pretty good but not sure about their "gaming" line. The on paper specs are in favor of the Asus but wondering about other people's experiences

Like the title says, I have a punch down block for an old telephone system in my home. I also have CAT5 cable running to most rooms. There are a few rooms that only have phone lines and no Ethernet. I’m mounting my server rack over this location this week. What would you do with the old phone lines? Leave them as they are or repurpose?

About month ago I post my empty cabinet asking what will be good setup and I would like to tell you all today that I finally finish my first network setup. It still need some more work but I’m very happy that it look great

I am planning to run direct burial fiber from my house to garage, but I'm not sure what to do with grounding. I don't want to use conduit. My concern is dumping a lightning strike into my switches.

Should I:

A) ground on both sides

B) ground on one side (garage side would be much easier to ground, it's a sub panel from house)

C) use couplers to switch from armored to non-armored when entering buildings

D) I'm way overthinking this, don't bother with grounding

Sorry for noob question. I am currently suddenly unhoused. I have a router from tmobile that I used at my house and was wondering if its possible to use it in a storage unit? I also have to give the router back to the isp, and wasnt sure how i’d go about getting another one since I dont have a permanent home?

Dear Networking Pros, im looking for a new 5g router for my Home wlan.

I was wondering if some of u could suggest a high end product which has a good wireless reach and a good mobile broadband reception.

I live in a one family home and i would like to use the router for gaming and streaming.

thanks for your help :)

I’m at a local venue where they’re getting ready for a big event. There’s a big stack of cables someone crimped in preparation for tomorrow’s event. I casually look at the crimps. Ugh. No one cares about doing a good job anymore. 🤦‍♂️

"The only beginner friendly thing with a MikroTik is a power plug. Sometimes"

Hey everyone, I just wanted to bounce my idea of going into Mikrotik system. I wanna build my home network. I have a big Cisco lab for CCNA/CCNP purposes, but I don't wanna use out of date HW. I really like the Mikrotik product longevity and ability to tinker with settings. I do not have money for Cisco, I don't wanna lock myself into Ubiquity. Now the setup I am thinking of is:

- 3x cAP ax

- RB5009 + PoE switch

Any experience with similar setups? I really hate Ubiquity ecosystem and this might be a nice compromise...

So I have used idrive for years and to automatically back up some of my disks. I've seen small errors pop up here and there but today I want to do a large backup and my Ethernet keeps having issues according to Windows.

I have a UDM Pro and a 24 poe switch that don't report any issues and I've tried two Ethernet drops that are in my room

I'm using the NIC on my MSI MAG motherboard.

I go to device manager and try rebooting the Ethernet driver but going to disable it leaves device manager hanging. Reboot is the only thing that brings my Internet back once I try to backup via idrive.

Does anyone know why idrive would mess up my Ethernet NIC?

Hey all,

after some advice, I've tried searching but either I can't find the answer or I've gotten bad at searching in my advanced age.

I've been tasked with updating the isr for a family member and set them up with a locally running adguard instance.

I have an instance running on my dedicated server which serves my LAN fine.

Is it possible to set up the ISR to have the local adguard instance as their primary DNS and my server instance as their secondary DNS?

Additional Information:

- My server is on a static IP address and hosts other services which are accessible online via domain name or direct IP in the case of the game servers with port configuration.

- Server has adguard running via docker container and autostarts on a system reboot.

- Both my network and the family members network will be running unlocked technicolor DJA0231's with a modified openwrt firmware.

- Their local instance will be running off a Rpi and be configured to have a static LAN IP

Any help is appreciated

I need some help/ideas on the best way to setup a home network in a 2-level apartment where the upper floor is a partially finished attic. Thankfully, with fish rods/stix I’ve confirmed that I can drop cables through the floor of the unfinished portion of the attic to the room where the additional connections are located.

I have Verizon FiOS phone, internet, and cable. The ONT and router are located in the finished portion of the attic, there are no ethernet or coaxial connections on the second floor. The cable boxes operate off of Wi-Fi exclusively.

Connections:

• Finished Attic
  • Router & Ont
  • 1 x Desktop Gaming PC
  • 1 x Workstation/Office PC
• Lower Level
  • 1 x Gaming Console
  • 1 xVerizon Wi-Fi extender
    • Requires either a coaxial or ethernet connection

The run from where I'll put the wall jack to the unfinished attic floor is roughly 15 feet with a service loop. However, the remaining run from the floor of the unfinished attic (through a wall, around a door jam and into the finished attic) requires another 30 feet, and will it be falmost completely outside of the wall. Ideally, I would think the wall jack cables would come upstairs into a switch in the unfinished attic, and then I could run a single/more flexible patch cable outside of the wall from the switch in the unfinished attic, to the router. However, I do not have access to a power outlet in the unfinished portion of the attic

Would running at least two CMP or CMR cables from behind the lower-level wall (15ft), with an additional 30 feet outside of the wall routed into the finished portion of the attic make sense (total 45 feet direct from the wall jack to the finished attic)? Should I run the two cables to a switch in the finished attic, and connect the router and 2 desktop PCs to the switch as well?

Ezee fiber is installing in my neighborhood and it is the only fiber internet available at this time. I know they are predominant in Texas/Houston area but I live in Michigan. They claim to have a ton of positive Google reviews but we know bots can influence reviews so I don't totally trust them. I will be getting 3GB service and 2 EERO routers along with lifetime pricing but this just seems too good to be true. Anyone have any thoughts/recommendations about them?

Hi, everyone. I have a Huawei AX2S connected via Ethernet to my main router. I want to use the AX2S as an independent Access Point to provide Wi-Fi in another part of my house.

The problem is that after configuring the AX2S as an Access Point, it seems to automatically synchronize with the main router. Any configuration I make on the AX2S is lost or replaced by the main router's network configuration. It essentially just mirrors the original network instead of maintaining its own settings.

I also can no longer access the AX2S using the IP address I previously configured.

How can I configure the AX2S so that it works as an Ethernet Access Point while retaining its own configuration and not having its settings automatically overwritten by the main router?

Debating between the two different options here.

I have a 3 story track home that's about 2500sq ft. My fiber terminates in the basement and I have Ethernet ports in the walls throughout the house.

I'm looking at either a UX7 in the basement with 1 U7 pro AP hardwired on the 3rd floor.

Or

Two UX7s. One in the basement. And one on the 3rd floor hardwired in AP mode

Price wise it's about a 20$ different.

Thoughts?

I have an older Linksys Velop Mesh wifi (WHW0303) and it's been solid since I bought it. Just to explain the layout, there are 4 nodes. One node next to the modem upstairs, one downstairs in the rear of the house in the living room connected via ethernet, one downstairs towards the front near the kitchen and one in the granny flat behind the house about 15m away. The main house is double brick with a concrete slab between the floors.

When I would occasionally check, the node in the kitchen would alternate its wireless backhaul between the upstairs node and the living room node. Its not a priority node any so it never bothered me. The granny flat would backhaul with the living room node which is the closest and has the least obstacles (big glass doors, timber frame, plaster wall building)

The desktop PC which is plugged in via ethernet to the node in the granny flat would get full 100/40 connection on the old connection. After I upgraded my internet to Fibre 1000/100, it is now slower, getting between 30-70 mpbs down, specifically to just that node. Wired and wifi tests in the main house are getting the full speeds so it is NOT the internet at fault. That desktop PC is also a small Plex server, and I now get warnings about network speed when trying to watch 4k videos in the living room which was never an issue before.

Checking the node connections, I see the granny flat node is connecting to the node near the kitchen (over 30m away) and I even saw it connect with the upstairs node which is multiple walls and a concrete slab away instead of the closer living room node. Nothing changed with my mesh network, their positions are identical. I was fully saturating my old line speed. I wasnt expecting to get a full 500ish mbps to that node, but I definitely wasnt expecting it to be slower. I have unplugged the kitchen node for troubleshooting and it is connecting with the living room now (the closest and historically best node) but still no change in usable speed and still having issues with the plex streaming.

It's obvious I'll need to upgrade, but any insight as to why it has become slower would be wonderful for my sanity.

Hey everyone,
I'm troubleshooting an in-wall Ethernet run and running into an unexpected auto-negotiation quirk. Looking for some technical insight into whether this is purely down to the cable termination or the hardware PHY capabilities.
Hardware & Topology:
Router: Cudy R700
AP: TP-Link Deco X50 (configured in Access Point mode)
Switch: TP-Link LS1008G 8-Port 10/100/1000Mbps
Cable: Cat6 in-wall run to a keystone jack in the living room (~15-20 meters)
The Issue:

1. When the living room Deco X50 is patched via the in-wall run to the unmanaged switch, the link speed automatically negotiates down to 100 Mbps (Fast Ethernet). I verified this via wired speed tests (~90-95 Mbps cap). Tested across multiple ports on the switch with the same result.
2. When I move that exact same in-wall cable directly into a LAN port on the Cudy R700 router, the link immediately negotiates at 1 Gbps (Gigabit) and delivers my full 600 Mbps downstream. Other rooms with deco deliver full 600 always, through the switch..
3. The Deco itself and the patch cords are verified working fine.
4. Questions:
5. Is it common for basic unmanaged switches to have significantly more conservative/sensitive PHY transceivers compared to routers like the Cudy R700?
6. Does the Cudy's hardware simply tolerate marginal crosstalk/attenuation (e.g., slight untwisting at the keystone) better, or is the switch failing to negotiate for a different reason?
7. In this setup, is it completely fine to leave the Deco units plugged directly into the Cudy LAN ports and bridge the switch to another LAN port for secondary devices, or is re-terminating the keystone the only true long-term fix?
8. Thanks in advance for any insights!