Your home network

[rhyds]

My setup's pretty simple, despite working in IT. When I get home I prefer not to spend my downtime "tinkering" unless its a specific project.

My ADSL router's hooked up to an extension phone socket in the spare bedroom (as my master socket was no where near a 13A socket when I moved in). From there it does WiFi for the house (with handy spillover in to the garden). I've removed the ringer wire from all my phone sockets, but as I'm barely 300yds from the telephone exchange my speeds are pretty good.

A pair of Devolo powerline adaptors and a cheapo TP-Link switch then provide ethernet to my Sony BD home cinema unit and my Humax Foxsat HDR, which is running custom firmware. The firmware means the HDR can work as a media server, and is controllable from a web page that's accessible on all my devices. The BD unit does all the "smart" work for my dumb-as-a-post TV.

Future upgrades are a new router, scuppered the other day when Amazon sent me the wrong unit (despite showing the right unit in the images), and relocate the router to the master socket now that there's a socket there.

mines dead simple. SH2 to a 5 port switch that sorts my Tivo Sky TV and Media PC out. SH2 sorts my PC and its wifi does everything else. Boring compared

[Ignitionnet]

In my experience many IT guys, especially those in the enterprise space, don't generally do that much with their home networks unless they have a specific reason to.

[techguyone]

Mines really simple too

Shub1 (in modem mode) connected to a dlink DIR -615 router

1 ethernet to my pc, 1 to the kids x-box next to the tv

Everything else connects wirelessly

Daughter PC via USB dongle,

4 smartphones
1 chromecast
1 Philips smart tv
3 tablets

I wouldn't like to be in a pre wireless world now I must admit.


Only thing I'd change right now, is perhaps the router for something a bit further reaching. (I can just about get a signal in all of the house, though it's pretty weak at the edges & far enough into the garden to be able to use my phone on a Bluetooth connection to stream from Google music ok.

Can't see the point for any switches or gigabyte hubs etc when there's only one pc hard-wired in my house. (which isn't a mansion clearly as a 615 covers all the rooms)

I like to Keep It simple Stupid (KISS) when possible.

[Stuart]

My setup is a little unusual, but not especially complicated..

Superhub 1 (in modem mode) connected to a Cisco E4200. This is providing wifi and wired access. It's also connected to an Apple Time Capsule that is acting a switch, wifi extender (set up to ensure adequate speed at the back of my house) and NAS. The Time Capsule will also have another function when I've finished checking that I was able to restore all my data properly as I have an external HDD that was hosting a temporary image of my Mac Laptop. This function will be to act as a storage location for Time Machine on the couple of Macs we have.

I know off site backup is best, and any really important data is backed up off site. This is just to enable quicker recovery should something happen to one of the Macs (such as hard drive failure).

[broadbandking]

I have a simple set up of
Superhub 2 connected wired to my NAS and Microserver/PC
Wireless connected to laptop, 2 smart phones, smart TV, ipad and PS3

[qasdfdsaq]

I've now upgraded to a fully VLAN'd setup with a pfsense firewall/router.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

I've now upgraded to a fully VLAN'd setup with a pfsense firewall/router.

Whatever floats your boat!

[qasdfdsaq]

Well it's not my boat that's the problem. We have some hardcore gamers in the house who constantly complain about crappy latency, which in other words means the latency through an embedded router going up by 10 milliseconds if it's doing something CPU intensive. Apparently, this is unacceptable to them.

Granted, the load average would readily hit 4.0+ on the old router if you tried to view a bandwidth graph at the same time as downloading, and the bandwidth chart would report 100-150Mbps (on a 80Mb line) due to timing problems. It's more the increased processing power of going from 680Mhz MIPS to 4.5Ghz of x86-64 that we wanted.

There's also the problem of Apple devices spamming Avahi announces all over the place killing battery life on mobile phones, hence they're now on an isolated VLAN.

[Ignitionnet]

Things like that are why I'm glad I'm not in a house share.

That and I just generally dislike people.

My network:

Couple of desktop PCs
Couple of laptops
Couple of tablets, phones etc..

Rubbish 4Mb "broadband" from TalkTalk, router plugged into Netgear 1Gb switch.
TP-Link Wi-Fi access point

The only exciting part is a Synology DS412 with 3 x 3TB drives in RAID5, bonded to the Netgear switch at 2Gb. Also backed up daily using an external 2TB WD passport drive.

Oh - and a CAT5e which runs downstairs to a second 8 port Gb switch to connect the TV and Sky box to the internet.

[General Maximus]

Have you had a look at the difference in price between what you are currently paying for your 4mbits an fttc option? If you have seversl TBs if storage you pressumably want a chunky connection to download stuff tout suite.

[broadbandking]

Originally Posted by LSainsbury

My network:

Couple of desktop PCs
Couple of laptops
Couple of tablets, phones etc..

Rubbish 4Mb "broadband" from TalkTalk, router plugged into Netgear 1Gb switch.
TP-Link Wi-Fi access point

The only exciting part is a Synology DS412 with 3 x 3TB drives in RAID5, bonded to the Netgear switch at 2Gb. Also backed up daily using an external 2TB WD passport drive.

Oh - and a CAT5e which runs downstairs to a second 8 port Gb switch to connect the TV and Sky box to the internet.

All that on a 4Mb connection OUCH

[qasdfdsaq]

I wouldn't say ouch much. I assume much of the point of the local storage is so he doesn't have to stream everything from the internet

[Ignitionnet]

A bad WAN connection can force the odd bit of creativity. When on 1.3Mb here I was plotting a whole gamut of ways to reduce usage on the broadband, including inserting a caching proxy (including secure sites to maximise benefit) and using WAN optimization to a virtual instance in a datacentre.