The core of the future house is the network. The network is the nerve system of your house. This will dictate how fast devices communicate, how secure your network is and greatly increase the functions of your house. Since the pandemic has started, many more people are staying at home. With this said, a good home network is very sought after. In this article, we will talk about home automation, network connectivity, subnetworks, firewalls and switches.
The router(pfsense)
For a home network, we are going to think of the router as the brains of the network. It will be responsible for connecting to the internet. Providing a firewall against the internet. The router will also have the DHCP server. This box should have an open source linux of freebsd OS. The router I am going to sudgest is a good router but isn’t the only one that should be considered. I would recomend running a PfSense router. Ether buy a netgate router, buying a router motherboard and install PfSense on it. You can also run PFsese on a dedicated computer that has 2 or more network adaptors. The recomended hardware is a open source router motherboard from PCengines. It has 3, gigabit network adaptors. This routers has plenty of memory in it to run Pfsense. If you order this board, get the metal case. It looks good and metal is nice to have. The main reason we want to run pfsense is because it is open source. The software is reviewed by people who understand security. With open source, we can feel safe knowing there are not back doors. If there was, someone will find and it report it. Other reasons are the firewall, subnetting, quality of service, built in VPN server and intrusion detectons. You can see pfsese is very powerful and if configured correctly, will greatly increase your network security.
Firewall and VPN
One of the first things to configure is the firewall. Turn it on. You should not open ports unless you are running a server. The server we will be runign is a OpenVPN server. For example, if you wanted to use remote desktop or view your secuirty camersa, you would not open up the ports for remote desktop or webcams. What you would do is configure a VPN server. This way, when you are away from home, you can use the VPN server to connect your remote devices to your home network. This connection will be secure and give you access to your network like you are at home. Another advange of using a VPN is you can connect your phone to it while on public or unsecure WIFI. This will encript your trafic back to your house. Protecting you from other users of the public or unsecure WIFI you are connected to.
VLans and Subnets
What are VLans and why do we need them at home? A VLan is a way to logically divide a physical network in to segments or subnets that can or can’t be communicate with other subnets based on firewall rules. This gives you another layer of protection. Keeping secure devices away from unsecure devices is one of the only ways to protect your self from cheap Internet of Things(IoT) devices. Everyone has them. This can be a smart switch, smart thermostat, smart TV, basically, anything smart is an IoT device. These devices are newer and many companies are coming out with new ones every day. One problem with these devices are some are only support for a short time. Leaving security holes or just sending your data outside of your network. After you buy a smart device, you might find out it is not very secure and one thing you can do to secure them it to create a network for IoT devices. This network will not have access to your secure networks. In order to have a VLan, we will need 2 or more switches or a switch that supports VLans.
Quality of Service
This might see obvious what Quality of Service(QoS) does. It gives you setting to ensure specific traffic get priority.
Hope you enjoyed this article on Home networking Best Practices. Look forwarded to reading your post. If you want further information on any subject, please send a message and I will review it. Future topics will be what smart devices should I buy. Cloud services, what ones to use and what ones to avoid. How to automate your home. How to debload windows. Is my memory slowing down my PC? Thanks for visiting, come again.
