What is your home network infrastructure like?
Ethernet or is everything WiFi? Is there a dedicated firewall? Servers running on a raspberry? Do you have VLANs configured?

Currently running about 60 devices on Ethernet. About 11 on WiFi.

I also run two different networks for internal vs external devices.

@sariel what's "external" in this context?

Just a RIPE Atlas probe and my PCs connected to a cheap unmanaged gigabit switch connected to a provider-provided home router. The smartphone gets its updates over the router-provided WLAN.

No servers, no VLAN, no IDS or dedicated firewalls. Just reasonably hardened and administrated PCs.

I use Gentoo btw.

@sariel wtf are u doing with 60 plus network devices? Oo

I have a provider delivered FTU directly attached to my router (mikrotik with 10 ports and disabled wi-fi). For the pppoe config on the incoming fiber I already need a few vlans (tv, internet, and phone) but i also have a main and guest network. A ruckus AP provides wireless access. There are around 15 devices, about half of them are connected to ethernet rest is wireless.
Using the routers firewall.

I have a home server/media center based on Intel NUC

Just some okay TP-Link with most things connected wirelessly except for my work PC which is using a cable

@IntrusionCM

8 rokus
4 laptops for work
1 3D printer
2 workshop laptops
3 dedicated servers
2 racked desktops
3 dns rpis(primary, backup, and private)
1 NAS
1 VPN appliance
4 wireless APs
1 DV ripper
1 NVR
12 cameras

There's also any time 1-3 devices on my bench at any time that I'm fixing for someone.

So, maybe not the 60 I had thought but it's easy to lose track of them 😂

I'm planning on adding a handful of sensors to my garden next year to track moisture and stuff so that'll probably be 5-8 wireless sensors and a wireless camera.

@sariel wtf, why do you need all of that at home?

@iiii comfort mostly.

This doesn't even cover the ~20 containers running on those three servers ranging from multimedia to torrenting, to financial and investment tracking.

I refuse to buy into cloud products. So if I can't find an open source alternative I'll usually write my own (to some degree).

I also host my own container image registry mirror. In the event of a network outage I can maintain the systems indefinitely as long as there's power.

So many of my coworkers have been bit by cloud only products. Between going out of business and planned obsolescence I figure I've saved myself a couple thousand dollars and stopped a couple bags of ewaste.

@sariel pretty hardcore stuff

@sariel damn it what kind of mansion do you live that you need 4 WiFi access points (and 8 rokus)?
Also do you mean a DVD ripper or is DV singing I don't know about?

@hjk101 probably a blueray Digital Video ripper

5 laptops, 3 tablets, 3 phones, 1 desktop, 2 printers, 3 servers, 1 managed switch, and 1 pfsense box.

I have 3 VLANs, services, trusted, and public. Wifi is on the public vlan, only Ethernet devices on trusted and services. Services can be accessed by trusted, but has restricted access from the public subnet.

For services I'm hosting: deluge, jackett, sonarr, radarr, plex, jellyfin, nextcloud, a few flask websites, nginx RP, and bind9 (all with docker compose). I also have a few VMs.

I'm currently in the process of racking everything up and switching to kubernetes using harvester and virtualized nodes!

@hjk101 it's the biggest house I have ever(and will ever) live in.

Around 5000sqft 4 finished floors(including basement). I got it pre pandemic for a steal due to a divorcing couple. Otherwise I never would have been able to afford it.

Also as @iiii said I mean ripper. Currently does DVDs but I'm working on getting it to do blurays. My wife and I have a huge movie collection that we started when we were teens. Some of my stuff you can't even find online. I also have around 200 VHS cassettes I need to start archiving that likely has some lost footage between 1993 to early 2000s. I even have live footage of Sept 11 as it happened that might be needed on the internet archive.

@nitwhiz sorry, missed your question.

External are things that have direct access to the internet. Laptops, phones, VPN server

Internal are things that do not have access to the internet. Cameras, nas, 3d printer, "smart" iot plugs etc.

Like I said, I hate cloud based products. I just don't feel they're mature enough yet nor is my government technologicaly mature enough to protect my privacy. Recent changes to sales on Chinese manufactured cameras is a good example of why I did this.

Most of the cameras that I run are Chinese manufactured. The hardware is Chinese. The packaging is chinese. The firmware is Chinese. Before I even connected those cameras up to any network I created private Network separate from everything else so that I could sniff the packets to see what the cameras were doing.

They immediately attempted to phone home. I don't fucking like that. I don't care what kind of marketing bullshit or metric tracking bullshit they want, I'm not a data point.

@Nanos So you are a tech hoarder?

@Nanos Heavy water should sell pretty good. But if you sell it now and then need some for nucular eperiments later, you would wish you never sold it. So better to just keep it - like all the other massive heaps of exotic stuff you certainly will be lucky to have if you ever happen to need it.

@Nanos That is a nice cable fabric you got there. Still a lot of visible wall though...

I have fiber modem connected to a large openwrt hub that connects to several openwrt wifi spots to make a good multiroom network. Bc meshes are too hard for me. Also, I have a dedicated raspberry pi running pihole connected with Ethernet. The only thing that is not openwrt is my modem bc it’s provided for free by my provider

Just kidding lol. This is the kind of network I would do when I finally can feel like home somewhere. I don’t have a home. This bothers me. I never felt like home anywhere, even at the house I grew up in. So yep, it’s essentially some random WiFi that was in my rental flat

@sariel do you have a where you explain in detail your setup, being a server writer and self hoster myself I feel a noob given your setup 😓

@h4xx3r 😅 I actually don't. I have wanted to but I spend about 50% of my time at work doing that so I'm not very motivated to do it at home too.

What has helped me a ton is doing things semi-related for work. I used to do homelab stuff to 100% work on work and teach myself topics in a sandbox. Now that I have a sufficient amount of experience under my belt it's usually more like 15% work and 75% home and 10% play.

Keep in mind my lab has grown in size enormously over the last three years. I had disposable income that I wasn't spending on driving to work or maintaining vehicles.

Homelabs are like pets. Not everyone wants or can have a St. Bernard. Be happy and proud of your lab, you built it!

Oh yeah, also. My first lab was an HP pavilion laptop with a busted ass screen duct taped to the underside of a desk. It had 512mb of ram and a P3 single core at 1.2ghz.

I taught myself Linux on that thing, I must have reinstalled Linux about 100 times. At some point I could partition the drive in my sleep.

If it wasn't for that shitty little notebook I would probably be building houses or farming some shitlords fields.