Last year — I wrote about plans for my home network, or home network v2, as I called it. Let’s take a look at what I have done, what remains, and what has changed since then.
A few Wi-Fi improvements
After my Wi-Fi mapping adventure — I found a few spots with low Wi-Fi signal. Both kids’ rooms on the 2nd floor only had mediocre signal, at -67 and -68 dBm 2.4 GHz, and the side garden had -71 dBm — which is terrible!
I also discovered that Mona’s side of the bed had much worse Wi-Fi signal than my side. This was because I had a clear line of sight to the UAP-AC-IW in the den, but the signal to Mona’s side had to go through a wall and her wardrobe…
Simply not acceptable, something had to be done!
Setting up a virtual VyOS router
I’ve had many routers over the years — Linksys WRT54GL, Linux and iptables, ASUS RT-N66U, Ubiquiti USG, OPNsense, Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, and MikroTik CCR1009. At least those are the ones I can remember.
But I’ve been fascinated by VyOS ever since I first heard about it, even more so after using the EdgeRouter CLI. As both VyOS and EdgeOS are forks of Vyatta.
Fascinated and intimidated is probably more accurate — the lack of a GUI doesn’t give you a lot of help… But at the same time, it’s a great learning experience — you have to know and understand what you are doing 🙂
So I set out to replace my internet facing router — with a virtualized VyOS instance 🙂
Two CAT6 cables and a fiber — from the basement to the attic
Since we first moved into this house — I’ve wanted to ceiling mount a Wi-Fi access point on the 2nd floor. But getting a network cable to the attic was challenging, so instead I opted for a Unifi UAP-AC-IW in the upstairs living room.
It’s time to do it right, but I’m not running just one. My earlier Wi-Fi mapping revealed poor 5 GHz coverage in the kid’s rooms, so I’m running two CAT6 cables — for two ceiling mounted Wi-Fi access points.
To have the option of running more CAT6 to rooms on the 2nd floor later — I’m including a 10 Gbit fiber as well 😎
And as my previous runs — no visible cables.
Altibox native dual-stack IPv6 on EdgeRouter
I recently decided to give Altibox and their 6rd implementation another go — searching the interwebs I stumbled upon a Norwegian forum post that read (translation by me):
Altibox offers native dual-stack IPv6 if your home central is in bridge mode. You get a /56 prefix though DHCPv6-PD (prefix delegation) and can split it into multiple /64 networks. (…) — sveinse
WHAT!? Really? They offer native dual-stack IPv6 with DHCPv6-PD? Let’s test it! 🥳