Setting up a home network

MOSZ · April 23, 2016

Please forgive my ignorance in networking but I'm having trouble figuring out how I'm going to set up my home network in my new apartment. I have CAT 5e running through the apt and have three rooms that will be networked, plus the closet where all the cables end. Each room will have two or more devices connected to the network. I was thinking of setting it up like this:

Modem>Router/WIFI>Switch>CAT5e Cable to rooms>Data Jack>Switch> and then connect my devices(PS4, PC, Apple TV etc)

I was planning on putting 4 port switches in each room.

Will this work?

Will connecting multiple switches in the network cause problems?

Is there a better way?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Bacon8tor · April 23, 2016

I think there are a few ways you can accomplish this .

1) if you have an old computer look into pfSense you can check this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0JFfpG4BWI

I am using an old dual core pc with an 80gb hard drive and 1 gbpit nic

then your router Wifi should be used as an acces point takes that load off it, and I noticed a bit of a difference on my wifi signal when I did this. also with pfsense you can easily used squid proxy to cache and websites will load alot faster .

its really easy to set up and some really cool stuff you can do with it .

make sure all your switches and NICs are GbE (Gigabit) otherwise cat5e is useless .

and there is no problem with having multiple switches on the same network

unless you ran out of Ip addresses ( I think ) but you leave it at a default 255.255.255.0 or /24 you have 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.255 available I think you should be good

Mark77 · April 23, 2016

Keep in mind that a lot of "older" (ie: Pre-Sandy Bridge) computers use a *lot* of power, particularly in the idle regime which is where a gateway will sit most of the time.

At $1/watt/year, it doesn't take a lot of consumption to make buying a "router" that can do the "gateway" work very economical in comparison.

As far as switches go, as long as they're in a hierarchical "tree", that is fine. If you include any 'loops' in your Ethernet configuration, you will run into a lot of problems and everything probably will not work (unless you've configured it for STP).