Rebuilding the Network | Philipp Haidenbauer

Today I am sitting in the living room of the new Apartment. My parents and I worked hard to get this far.

We hung up shelves, laid cable ducts and cleaned the whole place. It gets more livable every day. We also built a large shelve in my office room. It will house my main PC, NAS, my Raspberry PI Rack, Network and Home Automation stuff.

Of course, living without proper internet for several days now, I rebuilt my network. I thought I can watch some stuff on the tv today through the FireTV stick connected to the NAS through Plex, but the FireTV stick needs Internet Access, so I will have to connect my MacBook to the tv.

Anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about my network setup. In Austria, we get a WLAN Router/Modem from our internet service provider (ISP), sadly they are mostly crap and you can’t do anything about it

So when I moved into my old apartment a few years ago, I thought I should change it up, so changing the ISP wouldn’t be painful (basically reconfiguring Port Forwardings, DHCP and Fixed IP Addresses and so on).

I am not going to mention the Hardware Manufactures, as I don’t want to make free advertising for them. :)

So, at first the Modem/Router of my ISP, the internal WLAN is disabled and I set the Port Forwardings based on my list.

Behind that comes the “Router of my Choice”. I thought about flashing it with OpenWRT, but in over four years, I didn’t need to change anything “low level” and the firmware that is running on it is pretty good and stable.

This router handles basically my whole network. It got a 5 Ghz and a 2,4 Ghz WLAN Antenna and Gigabit Ethernet.

Only on cable connects that piece to my 16-port Gigabit Switch and from there all my devices are connected. The raspberry pi rack has a separate switch, as the older once are only capable of 100 Mbit, and I don’t want them to slow my whole network.

There will probably more technical posts in the future, as I’m going to set up my home automation as soon as I’ve got a stable internet connection here, so I don’t have to look up everything on my mobile.