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Safer WIFI setup for Home — Small Office
Using VLAN’s in a SOHO Environment
A lot of work is happening from home now. Because of that, the security requirements for home networks have increased as well.
In the last years, when setting up my home network, I noticed that it is difficult to have several WLAN-Access points and to divide the network into a guest and a private network. The plan was to have a network used by the guest devices and a network used privately. The project aimed to have a network complying with the following requirements:
- The network should use the available internet bandwidth maximally
- The network should provide a guest network
- The network should allow fast roaming of WIFI-devices
- The network should be low cost
After doing some research, I ended up with a network design that has proven to be very good, which I present here.
The core of the network design is the use of VLAN. VLAN is extensively used in business environments- not so much at homes, though.
So what is VLAN?
With VLAN, it is possible to segregate a physical network into many different logical networks. This means more networks over the already available cable network. For detailed information, please refer to here.
I used the following hardware for this project:
Router: Fritzbox 7590
Access Points: 2 Unifi 6 Lite Access Points
Controller: Unifi installed on a Raspberry PI4B
Switches: 2 Managed Switches from TP-Link (TL-SG108E)
The network cables go from the basement to each room over CAT6 Ethernet cable, which terminates on a patch field (ports 22–24).
For this project, I bought a 19" Rack- which might be just a little oversized 😀
In the pictures, you can see
- Top left: DSL Router AVM Fritzbox 7590
- Bottom right: TP-Link (TL-SG108E)
