General guidance for setup home usage and learning networking concepts

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

General guidance on hardware selection for newbie using netgate 2100. For general usage and learning network concepts.

I wired my home with cat6e, installed netgate 2100, unmanaged tplink switch, and a unify access point pro.

It’s working so far but for basic home usage. I’d like to monitor the traffic a bit and look at segregation of the network with vlans. I had realize I was having a harder time than expected not getting a managed switch.

I’m thinking about getting a 5 port unify mini to understand vlans and track traffic and then play around with firewalls settings a bit. Any suggestions for a newbie to get started. I’ve seen a couple videos but I suppose I need a little time in the lab to wrap my head around the concepts. This would be my diy kinda lab but also support my networking needs at home.

2

I started with a cheap TPlink switch. It worked great and you will learning a lot setting it up through the web interface

https://www.amazon.com/Ethernet-Unmanaged-Shielded-Replacement-TL-SG108E/dp/B00K4DS5KU/

3

UniFi is among the easiest to learn VLAN’s with but really any managed switch will work.

I have a lot of pfsense videos in my playlist to get you started with that, you might want to check out my NTOP video to get insight into the traffic.

4

Awesome thank you all.

5

OPNsense is another choice for a firewall, but to be honest, I’m still struggling a little with it. The way that Suricata is done is different and something I’m trying to learn into right now.

But, I just swapped out my pfsense firewall to new hardware on OPNsense and so far things are working. Going to need to pass real traffic through to see if Suricata is working the way I want, and tune the rules. And then spend some time with Zenarmor and see if it is worth the RAM it occupies. I think pfsense is a little more efficient with RAM usage, my used RAM seems very high at 7GB (Suricata ET Open rules and a few others, plus the free Zenarmor added about 3GB). Glad I increased up to 16GB for this test machine.