I’ve been slowly building up my home network and recently I purchased lot more gear. So I figured I could try blogging my adventures in setting everything up. One major motivation for blogging this is to serve as a documentation for future self; that is something I’ve struggled with in the past.

Current situation

My current network is centered around ancient TP-link Archer C7 box running OpenWrt. Previously I had moved the main internet routing to separate NanoPi R5S box (also running OpenWrt) because archer-c7 could not keep up with my internet connection speeds (currently nominally 600 Mbps down) anymore. I also wanted to run SQM etc to fight bufferbloat which further increases CPU demand for the router. Additionally I have to live with the DOCSIS modem that I got from my ISP.

So archer-c7 functions as a switch for all my wired devices (TV and main PC) and as a wifi ap for wireless devices (laptops, ipad, kindle etc). This is obviously not very optimal and it has only 4+1 (gigabit) ports available. I wanted to add minipc as a home server for my network and that triggered fairly big changes to the setup.

I have also old Haswell-era tower server collecting dust from previous time I thought it would be fun idea to setup homelab. Fingers crossed this time will be more successful.

Purchases

To expand by home setup I ended up purchasing:

• GMKtec Nucbox M7 Ultra minipc as homelab server
• Zyxel XS1930-12HP as the main switch
• Aruba AP-555 as wifi access point

These both expand my capability by adding lot more ports and whole new server machine, and upgrades things to a modern standard (Wifi 6 and multi-gigabit ethernet).

Motivation

The trigger for this build-up was that I did develop a small web application for my group of friends and it is currently running on AWS. I would really like to get the application migrated to my own server instead, which would save 15+ eur/month and give me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. I get enough of AWS at $DAYJOB and don’t want to do that in my private life. Nor do I really like AWS from ethics etc viewpoint, it being largely big proprietary blob.

Goals

The plan is to run Proxmox VE on the minipc to serve as VM host. M7-ultra has two ethernet ports so I can dedicate one for proxmox and passthrough the other one to a VM. Inside proxmox I want to try to run opnsense as a virtual router that can handle all the networking for the other VMs. What other VMs will I run is still tbd. I’ll probably start with a VM for lpmpl, but idk if I will split up it to smaller VMs (forgejo, grafana, postgresql etc). In the long term I’d want to get all the configuration defined with infrastructure-as-code in self-hosted git repos, with ci/cd and everything. And of course all the basic network services (dns, email, monitoring/logs, sso/auth/directory, etc). And finally this blog also needs hosting somewhere!

For other networking stuff I think it could be fun to have separate guest and iot wifi networks. Obviously I will want to get rid of the old archer-c7 and migrate all wired devices to the new Zyxel switch, and wireless stuff to the new AP.

Plan

Main priority now is to get the new AP operational. I think I’ll want to have the AP send vlan tagged frames so I need to configure switch and r5s router to handle that. I also need to setup some access ports and vlans on the switch for main pc and tv, I hope that should be pretty straightforward.

After that I can remove archer-c7 and start fiddling with the minipc and proxmox. One silly limitation I have right now is that I ran out of sockets on my power strip so I can not power up the minipc while archer-c7 is still there.