My home network
I thought I’d document my home network, or at least the more interesting parts.
Domain
I own priddle.network and use it exclusively for my home network.
I use DigitalOcean to manage my DNS. acme.sh and friends all support DO’s
DNS API so it’s a great way to get SSL certificates for my internal sites. I
guess I don’t really need it, but it’s easy to setup with an Nginx proxy, so
I’ve been doing it.
Modem/Internet
I use an ARRIS SURFboard DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem to connect to Spectrum for Internet. Spectrum manages it entirely via TFTP… but it does belong to me.
I get about 300Mbps down and 10Mbps up from Spectrum.
Router
I run OPNsense on a Protectli FW4B.
I’m not doing anything too fancy with it. I setup priddle.network as my
network name and then use OPNsense’s DHCP and Unbound modules to set custom
DNS records for every machine on my network. I also setup DHCP to assign my
two Pi-holes as DNS servers for most of the machines on the network (aside
from my wife’s work computer).
Switches
For ethernet, I am using a cheap 24-port TP-Link switch. I have a few PoE devices that I power with a 5 port TP-Link PoE switch.
I also have an 8-port Netgear switch. My coax input is on the opposite side of my office and most of this gear is in a small 9u rack in the closet. This switch, the cable modem, and router are plugged in and hidden behind a cabinet.
WiFi
For WiFi, I recently switched to an Ubiquiti U6 Pro that I run in standalone mode. I’m not sure yet if I’ll switch my router out to an Ubiquiti gateway. For my apartment, the U6 Pro works just fine.
Pi-hole DNS servers
I run two instances of Pi-hole, one on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.1 with 2gb of RAM, and another on an older Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Plus Rev 1.3 with 1gb of RAM. They each use a UCTRONICS PoE hat for power.
NAS
For my NAS, I am using a Synology DS1522+. It has 2 WD Red Plus 10tb drives and 3 WD Red 12gb drives—for about 40tb of total storage. I upgraded to 32gb of RAM and threw in a couple 400gb Synology SSDs for about 745gb of caching.
I primarily use the NAS for sharing media files and for backups (via TimeMachine and manual ones).
I’m also running Docker on it and run Deluge and a Git server on it.
I’m using about 17tb of storage today and have 21tb free.
I just got a Tripp Lite SMART1500LCD to protect it from power outages.
Media
I’ve been using Plex since 2016 on Ubuntu with a Gigabyte Intel i3-4010U (Amazon no longer lists it). Plex has been giving me trouble lately with playback and I’ve been wanting to upgrade the hardware a little. I just got a new Beelink i5 mini PC on sale and switched from Plex to Emby. So far, so good.
We have 3 TVs and each has an Apple TV 4K attached with two HomePods (a 1st generation set in my office, and 2nd generation set each in the living room and bedroom).
Our 2 bathrooms each have HomePod minis, mainly so we can yell at Siri from the shower to add shampoo or soap to our grocery list.
Printing
I have a 9 year old Brother HL-2270DW that works great and I refuse to upgrade. We’ve bought toner every 2 years or so. I put Printopia on my Mac to make it work with AirPrint for our phones and iPads. I plan on using it until it dies (🤞).
IoT: Lights/Automation
For lights and automation, I have mostly Hue color lights. They’re expensive, but they are definitely better than the alternatives.
I’ve tried innr White Smart Bulbs and they work great software-wise, they don’t seem to dim as well as the real Hue lights.
In our living room we have: 3 Hue color lights and a fixture with 2 white Hue lights.
In our kitchen we have a single fixture with 3 innr white lights.
My office has 4 Hue color lights and an innr color light strip around my TV stand.
Our bedroom has 2 color Hue lights, one on each nightstand.
When we go out of town, I have 3 Logitech Circle View Cameras for spying on our cats.
Outside we run a meross Outdoor Wi-Fi Outlet to control Christmas decorations with Siri.
I also have a few meross Smart Plug Minis to control our Christmas tree lights and a couple other old school lights.
Technically our bed (Tempurpedic) is a smart bed, too. We also have a Roomba. I pretty much leave them alone besides letting Pi-hole block any tracking they try to do.
Personal Computers/Mobile Devices
This section needs a post of its own, but the personal computers we have are:
- Me:
- Mac mini M2 Pro (2023)
- MacBook Air M1 (2020)
- iPhone 15 Pro (2023)
- iPad Pro 2nd gen (2020)
- iPad mini 6th gen (2021)
- Wife:
- Thinkpad (for work, unknown model)
- MacBook Air Intel i3 (2016)
- iPhone 15 Pro (2023)
- iPad Pro 1st gen (2018)
We have quite a few gaming systems too but I’m not doing anything interesting with them network-wise.
Since OPNsense has support for vnstat, here’s what the WAN usage on my router looked like (i.e. traffic in/out from the internet):
| month | rx | tx | total | avg. rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec ‘22 | 1.24 TiB | 74.59 GiB | 1.31 TiB | 4.31 Mbit/s |
| Jan ‘23 | 1.04 TiB | 66.24 GiB | 1.10 TiB | 3.62 Mbit/s |
| Feb ‘23 | 959.34 GiB | 83.66 GiB | 1.02 TiB | 3.70 Mbit/s |
| Mar ‘23 | 1.03 TiB | 65.91 GiB | 1.10 TiB | 3.60 Mbit/s |
| Apr ‘23 | 1.21 TiB | 65.35 GiB | 1.27 TiB | 4.31 Mbit/s |
| May ‘23 | 1.22 TiB | 56.15 GiB | 1.28 TiB | 4.19 Mbit/s |
| Jun ‘23 | 1.17 TiB | 74.55 GiB | 1.24 TiB | 4.21 Mbit/s |
| Jul ‘23 | 1.26 TiB | 113.23 GiB | 1.37 TiB | 4.51 Mbit/s |
| Aug ‘23 | 721.31 GiB | 70.74 GiB | 792.05 GiB | 2.54 Mbit/s |
| Sep ‘23 | 1.18 TiB | 85.44 GiB | 1.27 TiB | 4.30 Mbit/s |
| Oct ‘23 | 1.23 TiB | 82.32 GiB | 1.31 TiB | 4.29 Mbit/s |
| Nov ‘23 | 904.41 GiB | 70.79 GiB | 975.20 GiB | 3.73 Mbit/s |
Most of that is Google Meet/Skype video calls from my wife and I with work. I took a trip for work in August and it definitely shows in our bandwidth usage.