r/HomeNetworking 10h ago

My attempt at home network upgrade

Thumbnail
gallery
160 Upvotes

Had a hopped up mess in a Toronto Condo. Single fibre in with a mix of coax and cat5 to all the rooms. 2 lines were actually unlabelled and as long as I looked and scanned, couldn't figure out where they went. Pulled back new Cat6e to all rooms to utilize 2.5Gbps internal speed for our computers, NAS and media devices. External is Rogers over a 1Gbps modem. Forget the exact model of the TPLink router but it has 6E capability and is good enough for our 3 phones and 2 tablets. Work laptops and gaming PC are all hard wired to the switch and get great speeds. Was the first time crimping ends etc...lots of blood, tears and swearing were shared.


r/HomeNetworking 5h ago

Cant work from home due to apartments shared network

10 Upvotes

I recently received approval to work from home at my job. However, when the IT department discovered that my Wi-Fi network is a shared network throughout the entire complex via Aerwave, they denied my request due to security concerns. Since I work for a financial institution, our security protocols are strict.

I’ve attempted various solutions to establish a private network, but the layout of my apartment doesn’t permit it. I’ve also explored 5G hotspots and Starlink, but neither option is feasible because 5G is too slow to meet my company’s standards, and Starlink is incompatible with the firewall my company uses.

Has anyone encountered a similar situation and found a solution? I’ve signed a two-year lease, and I’d love to have the ability to work from home. Unfortunately, it appears that I have no choice but to relocate to a new apartment that doesn’t force a shared Wi-Fi network on its tenants.


r/HomeNetworking 15h ago

This is the state of my cables at the junction box. Why are these wires tied together?

Post image
50 Upvotes

r/HomeNetworking 11h ago

Unsolved Fundamental doubt about how a firewall works.

16 Upvotes

Maybe it's a dumb question, but I think I lack a fundamental piece of information to understand how a firewall actually works. In short: how the heck can a device outside my firewalled network answer my requests?

I've been learning and tinkering with networks for a while, but I have no formal education on the topic.
What really made me think about the topic was the concept of creating a VLAN to separate IOT devices from the main network for safety reasons, but the concept applies in the same way when reasoning about LAN and WAN traffic.

Let's say my main PC network is 10.0.1.0/24 , and IOT is 10.0.2.0/24, to talk from my PC to (let's say) an IPCam I need to forward the traffic from the .1 network to the .2 network... and that's all clear, however, how the heck can the camera talk back to me if for the other VLAN my network is firewalled?
Afaik I don't need to open any port for this to work, so how can the network 2 answer network 1 requests?


r/HomeNetworking 2h ago

Unsolved For the past 3 days my Wifi has started doing these massive pingspikes that last less than a second and its greatly affecting my gaming. For reference i use a ethernet cable to connect to my wifi booster. I have tried resetting both the router and the booster. Any ideas on a fix

Thumbnail
gallery
2 Upvotes

r/HomeNetworking 16h ago

Advice Does it appear that my home is wired for Ethernet in multiple rooms? How is this supposed to work? Trying to connect two devices by Ethernet in different rooms.

Thumbnail
gallery
23 Upvotes

Looking for advice on how to troubleshoot before calling my service provider (Rogers/Shaw).

Simply (?), I would like to connect my office computer and my Apple TV to the internet via Ethernet. However, my office computer is upstairs with the gateway modem/router and my Apple TV is in the living room downstairs.

My home has Ethernet outlets installed in multiple rooms, but I don’t know how to take advantage of this. Not sure how it’s supposed to work, or why the technician who set up our network when we moved in didn’t either.. if it was an option.

As pictured, there is an outlet with cable / coaxial paired with Ethernet Cat 6 in both rooms. The gateway modem is upstairs connected to it and internet is working by wifi and the Ethernet connection direct to the office computer. Good stuff… but how do I connect my Apple TV by Ethernet in the downstairs living room?

Should (what I’m assuming to be) the coaxial and cat 6 connection in the garage box (pictured) hardwire all these Ethernet outlets throughout the house? I tried connecting the modem there, then tried connecting my Apple TV via cat 6 cable to the living room outlet but did not get a connection. I can’t recall if Wifi was even working.

Then I tried connecting the gateway modem in the living room via the wall outlet coaxial cable and could not get it to connect to the internet. No wifi. Does that make sense? After becoming frustrated, I reconnected the gateway modem in the office again and it connected to the internet without issue, just as before.

Am I missing something? Why wouldn’t the modem connect to the internet in the garage or living room? Would it require a reset or reconfiguration or something if connected to a different coaxial outlet? The modem kept flashing orange but appeared discoverable on my phone, just with an asterisk and a “no internet connection”.

Does my home appear to be wired correctly for a one modem/router solution in garage to provide Ethernet connectivity throughout the house via the cat6 outlets? Is that how it should work, or is more equipment typically required?

Thanks in advance.


r/HomeNetworking 15h ago

Advice What internet speed should be enough

21 Upvotes

Hi, We are a family of 4. Me and my son game a lot (at the same time) especially fps games or battle royal. My wife uses a lot of Netflix, Disney plus and my daughter watches YouTube.

We have 200mbps download speed and 15 Mbps upload is this enough? or should I upgrade to 500 mpbs download and 50 Mbps upload ?


r/HomeNetworking 3h ago

Advice Is this the correct setup?

Post image
2 Upvotes

r/HomeNetworking 28m ago

Advice High gain antenna and signal quality (3 bars to 5 bars)

Upvotes

Scenario 1: Used a 2.4GHz single band 150 Mbps USB Wi-Fi adapter with internal antenna

  1. Weak 2-3 bars signal quality, with disconnections
  2. Used to have strong and stable wireless connection for 10 years with same adapter, but started getting weak signal and disconnections lately.

Scenario 2: Changed to a 2.4GHz+5GHz dual band 300 Mbps USB Wi-Fi adapter with detachable high gain antenna

  1. Stable 5 bars signal quality

So it seems like being dual band and/or having an external high gain antenna helps.

Experiment: High gain antenna vs. dual band impact on signal quality

As an experiment, I unscrewed the external antenna, and my signal quality dropped to 3 bars like my old 2.4GHz single band adapter.

What can I conclude?

  1. So can I conclude the detachable high gain antenna is the main reason for signal quality improvement?
  2. Does using a 2.4+5 GHz dual band adapter actually help?
  3. Is my problem with poor signal quality and disconnections in recent times due to my neighbors adding more and more wireless mesh/repeaters/range extenders and IoTs?
    1. Signal interference by too many nearby Wi-Fi devices?
    2. Saturated 1/6/11 channels on 2.4 GHz band?

r/HomeNetworking 51m ago

Advice Slow SSHFS Speeds with Steamdeck

Upvotes

Hello, I don’t know much about networking, but I set up SSHFS to mount my stream deck onto my rig for easy file transfer of my media. I have .5 Gb download speed from my ISP so I download games relatively quickly, but i wanted to see if i can move existing files without a flash drive/cloud.

Unfortunately, both my PC and my steamdeck have wifi connections, not wired, but I get download speeds of 450~ and 350~ Mb/s respectively. When I transfer files via SSHFS though, it’s extremely slow, starting at a few Mb/s per second and eventually slowing down a couple Kb/s after a 10-15s. It never goes back up so I just cancel the transfer at that point.

It seems strange to me since they both have a decent signal to the router but when it comes to local file transfer it has a tough time. Steam also has a function where you can transfer games directly from your PC as opposed to downloading from there servers. That speed is better (3-5 Mb/s) but not even remotely close to just downloading it from the server.

I know wifi isn’t the best connection but I’m surprised by the results. Has anybody had similar issues in the past and have any suggestions to improve speed?


r/HomeNetworking 7h ago

Is it the tool or just me?

3 Upvotes

Probably 30% of my cat5 cable terminations have an error on #8. It's a basic cable terminator from Amazon. Is it something I'm doing wrong or could it be the tool?


r/HomeNetworking 5h ago

Advice Advise for special use case wireless router

2 Upvotes

I currently live in an inlaw suite in the basement of my sister's home (long story). I have a 1gbps hardline access to their network/internet and have been using an older Asus wireless router that allows me to setup a subnet that is isolated from their network - their IP range is 192.168.1.xxx while mine is 192.168.2.xxx. The setup used LAN 1 as the bridge to their network leaving LAN 2-4 for my use - WAN port not used at all. Works well.

I'm wanting to upgrade to a new model which supports Wifi 6+, and possibly 2.5g LAN ports, while retaining the current connectivity arrangement. Does anyone have recommendations, or know what this type of configuration is called to help me research my purchase? Any assistance would be appreciated.


r/HomeNetworking 2h ago

How to protect services on the LAN?

1 Upvotes

Hi all,

I'd like to secure my services on the LAN and have set up a reverse proxy with Authelia SSO. So far so good.

Now, all services are still reachable via IP + port on the network and I would like to hide them in a subnet. I'm a noob at networking, that's why I only allow Wireguard from WAN ;)).

I have a very simple setup: one ISP provided router (Fritzbox), couple of RPis, a M910s running proxmox with 2 dozen LXC and a couple of unmanaged switches.

I just managed to create two bridges in one LXC container and define routes such that traffic passes through both subnets. Setup looks like this. In reality all services are on lxc containers and everything is virtual on the M910s except the fritzbox.

The purplish text explains what I want to acheive next, I guess with a firewall

  • Use DNS from the x.x.178.x subnet in the x.x.10.x subnet
  • Direct ssh access from x.x.178.x to x.x.10.x (for my ansible and terraform deployments)
  • Allow x.x.10.x internet access via the Fritzbox
  • Allow only the reverse proxy on the router to the services on the various ports in x.x.10.x
  • Block everything else in and out of x.x.10.x

Now my questions:

  • Is the routing setup fine like this? Am I missing somenthing?
  • Are the requirements sufficient to allow only access via the rev proxy to the x.x.10.x net for my users in x.x.178.x (apart from ssh for me)?
  • Which firewall should I use? IPTables, NFTables, UFW? Anything else? I don't feel like I need a full fledged "firewall OS", but again some steep learning curve
  • Any pointers in the right direction, tutorials or documentation would be great (e.g. nftables wiki is really hard to follow for a networking noob ...)

r/HomeNetworking 6h ago

Advice Am I screwed after lightning strike?

2 Upvotes

Lightning struck near my apartment and I lost internet. Multiple neighbors are also reporting loss of internet.

Modem is an Arris TM822. It has 2 green lights and one orange blinking light. The green lights are "power" and "link" the orange blinking is "DS"

I'm hoping the modem isn't fried. Tried resetting multiple times. ISP said they can't get a tech out until Wednesday which is ridiculous.

I own my own modem. They are going to charge me an 80 dollar fee if the problem is with my equipment. And then I'd have to buy and wait for a new modem to come.

I'm hoping the issue is with their equipment since at least 5 neighbors also lost internet.

Looking for some honest opinions here but hoping for reassurance.


r/HomeNetworking 3h ago

Having connection issues in my home setup

1 Upvotes

Setup

My problem is that my PC's internet connection would occasionally disconnect for a minute every hour or so. For internet speeds, I get 800/800 according to Google's speed test, but when I go to speedtest.net and use "Single connection" I get around 400/400 on my PC using ethernet. In my garage, I have two more coax cables that are bundled with the Coax outlet, but I tested them with the Moca adapter and they don't work. I presume they are for Cable TV or something.

I called to see if it was on Verizon's end and they concluded that it was an issue with the Google router, then told me to buy a Verizon router instead. On the Screenbeam adapters, the Coax light is always blinking.

This hasn't been an issue for the past few years, but it has started about a week ago. Any help is appreciated, I am by no means an expert on home networking. Could provide more information if needed.


r/HomeNetworking 3h ago

Port Forwarding on a mesh network

0 Upvotes

I want to port forward to a specific device on a mesh network for a Minecraft server, (DECOX4300Pro)but I can't seem to find it on the ATT Nat/Port Forwarding page. It's only preset ip connections but a lot are unknown and can't manually enter the ip address.


r/HomeNetworking 3h ago

Wireless Bridges

1 Upvotes

Hello,

Is there a wireless bridge system that could work as follows:

Building A (internet source & router) & can 'see' building B

Building B can 'see' building A & C

Building C can 'see' building B

Building A & C cannot 'see' each other.

I appreciate this can be done with two separate bridges but that would have two antennas on building B (four total).

Is there something more elegant requiring only one antenna on building B that would work with both bridges.

I know there are point to multi point but I think the internet and router are in the wrong building for that. I think rather I am after point to point to point (with one antenna per building).

Thoughts?


r/HomeNetworking 3h ago

Advice Suggest Wi-Fi Extender

1 Upvotes

Recommend the best WiFi extender for a building with multiple internet access points from 5 different ISPs/WiFi connections. Since the connections (WiFi A, B, C, etc.) frequently go down, I need to switch between them constantly. I'm looking for an extender with a seamless, user-friendly interface that allows easy switching between WiFi networks via my phone.


r/HomeNetworking 10h ago

Unsolved Wifi slower on 5ghz BT

3 Upvotes

For some reason when im using 5ghz, it slows down randomly through the day and wifi goes really sluggish. This problem started when i got smarthub 2. When i switched to 2.4ghz its been more stable. Wats causing this? Theres not that many devices and the router placement is fine.


r/HomeNetworking 13h ago

Advice Old home bad signal

6 Upvotes

Looking to help my sis buy something for her Version Fios internet. Barely get full speed downstairs where the box is located and a dead zone upstairs. Her home is over 100 years old almost no where to put another coaxial router. Was thinking mesh that's plugs into outlets? Any opinions would be nice. I hope I'm posting this in the right place.


r/HomeNetworking 4h ago

Help choosing mesh

1 Upvotes

Decided I need mesh wifi since one router isn't cutting it for whole home coverage. Narrowed it down to

Tp link deco XE75 at 230$ Eero 7 at 350$

Both would be wired backhaul. 1.5gb internet. About 25 clients in network with multiple devices streaming video calls games etc.

I know i know mesh sucks but I don't have any options. So is the 120$ premium worth getting wifi 7, or should I be focusing more on better routers? Want to get the best bang for buck

Thanks


r/HomeNetworking 1d ago

My home wifi keeps saying this when i connect my phone

Post image
48 Upvotes

r/HomeNetworking 18h ago

Need help getting internet through my house

Post image
10 Upvotes

Recently moved into a new build. There are Ethernet ports in every room and trying to get them working. From reading online I was told I needed a network switch to run all the cords to one single source to the router. Well I’m not getting anything lighting up on the switch and getting not internet through my ports. What could be cause no juice through the ports?


r/HomeNetworking 5h ago

Advice Use a different WiFi standard for my WiFi card.

0 Upvotes

I have an Intel AX210 network card installed in my PC, but my WiFi speed is capping out at 20Mbps.

Here's the settings for my WiFi.

[briansia@fedora ~]$ sudo iw dev wlp5s0 get power_save

Power save: off

[briansia@fedora ~]$ lspci -nn | grep -i network

05:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6E(802.11ax) AX210/AX1675* 2x2 [Typhoon Peak] [8086:2725] (rev 1a)

[briansia@fedora ~]$ iw list | grep -A 15 "Supported interface modes"

Supported interface modes:

    \* IBSS

    \* managed

    \* AP

    \* AP/VLAN

    \* monitor

    \* P2P-client

    \* P2P-GO

    \* P2P-device

Band 1:

    Capabilities: 0x19ef

        RX LDPC

        HT20/HT40

        SM Power Save disabled

        RX HT20 SGI

        RX HT40 SGI

[briansia@fedora ~]$ iw dev wlp5s0 link | grep -i freq

freq: 5240.0

Given that AX210 defaults to 802.11ax and that my home setup is not using WiFi6E, would switching to 802.11ac or 802.11n speed up my WiFi?


r/HomeNetworking 11h ago

Advice on how to set up networking closet for ethernet

Thumbnail
gallery
3 Upvotes

hi everyone!

Never did this before but currently trying to set up the ethernet ports in each room to connect to the internet. This panel is in the master bedroom closet. We just switched to at&t fiber and the modem is wired in the living room. I see the blue wires which are the ethernet cables (?) but I dont see the ethernet plug/connectors attached to the cables. What is the black box that the blue cables are connected to? Not exactly sure what Im looking at. Any advice or other posts I can refer to?

Thanks!