When I began replacing my Unifi switches with MikroTik — I was very impressed with the MikroTik devices. So when I found a CCR1009-7G-1C-1S Core router, second hand, for a reasonable price — there was no reason not to buy it.
RouterOS seemed daunting at first; so I watched a lot of YouTube videos from The Network Berg, which increased my confidence 🙂
The last month or so I’ve been replacing my Ubiquity Unifi switches. It’s part of a complete network rebuild — more posts will follow…
Four years ago; when I first got into the Unifi system, I loved the single pane of glass admin interface. But now I feel that the interface is too glossed over, prioritizing looks over function. The new Unifi controller UI is just terrible…
I like networking, it’s one of my hobbies. I want VLANs to be named VLANs, not network isolation.
I’ve been familiarizing myself with MikroTik equipment recently, especially RouterOS — in a quest to learn and understand more about networking.
During that process I found the YouTube channel The Network Berg, which have been tremendously helpful. I noticed that he used EVE-NG for all his demos and tutorials. It’s a tool to emulate a virtual network environment.
So I set up my own EVE-NG server, here is how 👇
When we bought our house last year; it had lots of coax and telephone outlets, with conduit in the wall connecting them. I have no use for these outlets, but the wall boxes and conduits can be repurposed for Ethernet cables 🙂
All Ethernet cables goes to the patch panel in my home office.
One (potential) downside to running public services on your homelab, is that you expose your IP address. That may, or may not, be a problem — but here are ways around it. The simplest way is to put Cloudflare in front, but this will only handle web traffic, and is a bit of a black box.
Another, more hands-on, approach is to use a VPS (or LXC container); WireGuard and iptables. We will create a secure tunnel between the VPS/container and the homelab HAProxy instance, and forward traffic using iptables.