Hey folks, first post here - it’s gonna be long, so I apologize for it and appreciate any help I can have here.
I’m a software engineer working at home and just purchased my first house - found a good opportunity in the market and went for it. Now I want to design a good network infrastructure and for that I need your help.
I’ve been looking for Ubiquiti / Omada / etc setups but I have a major issue here: in my country (Portugal) modern houses have now a specific place for Communication infrastructure (Data, TV, Phone) called an ATI cabinet from which it serves the whole home via RJ45 cables on each division. The ISP fiber cable and modem/router goes to this really small cabinet (23cmx28cm) and then it serves the whole house. I think a small gateway router / switch could fit there. But I don’t want to use the ISP router. I want control - VLANs, separated networks with different ACLs, etc.
3 bedrooms (one of which is going to be my office) have only 1 RJ45 connection each, my living room / kitchen has 3 connections available. I want my office to be my home lab - I have a mini PC running Proxmox to have Home Assistant, etc. What could be a good setup for me to have? Any hints?
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I would put a small wired router in the cabinet. Then you can put further switches and APs wherever you need them in the house.
How fast is your Internet connection?
If you are ok with a pretty technical solution, the Mikrotik RB5009UG+S+IN would be a powerful but passively cooled option (it’s fanless) and a lot of ports for its size, and some ports >1Gbps. Basic setup is straightforward, but for more complex configurations there is a learning curve with Mikrotik. And they don’t have the best wireless AP solutions currently.
TP-Link have their Omada routers, which pair nicely with their APs. You probably have room for one of their small routers and a switch in the cabinet.
For APs there are lots of options. You can use on-wall ones in each room to provide wifi and a few Ethernet ports. The APs from TP-Link Omada, Ruckus, Aruba Instant On and Ubiquiti support vlans. In your office you will probably want a managed switch and an AP.
Oh, and if you go with PoE APs you could go for the more expensive Mikrotik RB5009UPr+S+IN to power the APs. The included power supply can provide about 76watts to power downstream 802.3af/at PoE devices (like APs).
I personally run an OPNSense firewall on a Protectli Vault firewall appliance, they’re pretty small units but powerful enough for what you’re looking for and more I imagine. It sounds like you’ll need an 8 port switch in your cabinet to feed networking into all your rooms then perhaps another 8 port in your office to run your home lab depending what else you’re looking to connect. Make sure you buy managed switches if you’re hoping to do vlans.
I’m also running Unifi APs and manage it via the Unifi Controller Docker container, if you’re buying 8 port switches the PoE variants are pretty affordable to remove the need for PoE injectors, just check the switch PoE budget to ensure you can power all the APs you’re planning and I would suggest buying something name brand and metal cases for performance and longevity.
Hope that helps
I’ve had the UDM here in the US for over 2 years and it has been great. You can easily add a USW-Lite-8-PoE switch to provide PoE to one or more Access Points. The nice thing is that the controller for all of those devices resides on the UDM and you have one interface to manage it all.