Hey folks, first post here - it’s gonna be long, so I apologize for it and appreciate any help I can have here.
I’m a software engineer working at home and just purchased my first house - found a good opportunity in the market and went for it. Now I want to design a good network infrastructure and for that I need your help.
I’ve been looking for Ubiquiti / Omada / etc setups but I have a major issue here: in my country (Portugal) modern houses have now a specific place for Communication infrastructure (Data, TV, Phone) called an ATI cabinet from which it serves the whole home via RJ45 cables on each division. The ISP fiber cable and modem/router goes to this really small cabinet (23cmx28cm) and then it serves the whole house. I think a small gateway router / switch could fit there. But I don’t want to use the ISP router. I want control - VLANs, separated networks with different ACLs, etc.
3 bedrooms (one of which is going to be my office) have only 1 RJ45 connection each, my living room / kitchen has 3 connections available. I want my office to be my home lab - I have a mini PC running Proxmox to have Home Assistant, etc. What could be a good setup for me to have? Any hints?
I personally run an OPNSense firewall on a Protectli Vault firewall appliance, they’re pretty small units but powerful enough for what you’re looking for and more I imagine. It sounds like you’ll need an 8 port switch in your cabinet to feed networking into all your rooms then perhaps another 8 port in your office to run your home lab depending what else you’re looking to connect. Make sure you buy managed switches if you’re hoping to do vlans.
I’m also running Unifi APs and manage it via the Unifi Controller Docker container, if you’re buying 8 port switches the PoE variants are pretty affordable to remove the need for PoE injectors, just check the switch PoE budget to ensure you can power all the APs you’re planning and I would suggest buying something name brand and metal cases for performance and longevity.
Hope that helps