Avoid these 10 pitfalls when setting up the network for your home lab

When you’re starting out on your home lab journey, complicated networking diagrams and things like documentation are the furthest things from your mind. Being able to build something cool and then see it working is what excites us, but the problem there is that not thinking through your network setup ahead of time means big problems down the line. Whether its running out of physical space, virtual space, or address space, here are some of the things you should think about before setting up your home lab’s networking.

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10

Not getting a large enough rack

You quickly outgrow smaller network racks

Most of our home lab staff here at XDA started with humble beginnings, generally with a few pieces of networking hardware stacked up where the ISP router used to be. That’s possibly where you’ll be starting as well, and there’s nothing wrong with that, because you can get to the gear easily to change cables or troubleshoot, and you’ll be doing a lot of that as you learn. You’ll possibly be doing lots of that anyway because networking is a fickle thing (and it’s almost always DNS’s fault), but at some point you’ll want to put that hardware into a network rack or cabinet.

Now, you might not need to go for a full-sized server rack because who has the space for one of those? But it’s important to think a couple of steps ahead and get a rack that will grow with you as you add more networking equipment. Maybe you want to add racked servers, and then you really should think about a UPS for clean backup power, and you can see how this quickly adds up to more space than your rack may contain.

The most important measurement isn’t the height though, it’s the depth. You can easily stack things on top of a shorter cabinet in the short term, but if your rack is 26 inches deep and your server is 27 inches, you’re going to have a bad time. Really, it’s worth getting the deepest rack that your space will hold, so that you don’t have to worry about it in the future.

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9

Picking the wrong address space

Once you start adding devices, you’ll kick yourself that you used 192.168.x.x

One important consideration before connecting network devices is which address space to use. You don’t want to limit the number of devices that can live on the network, but you also don’t want to make it so large that ARP traffic will start eating into bandwidth. You also want to pick an address space that won’t conflict with other networks you may wish to connect to in the future, like corporate LANs, if you need to VPN into them.

There are also some services that use specific address spaces by default that you also don’t want to conflict with. One example is Docker, which often uses 172.16.0.0/12. You can either change the address pool that Docker uses or pick something saner for your home lab network, and the latter is the easier choice. Many home labbers use the 10.x.x.x address space, because it’s easier to type, but also less likely to conflict with other networks or with your home network if you have that separate.

And don’t use 192.168.x.x for your home lab, leave that for your home network because most consumer devices default to an IP in that range, and you’ll just run into weird issues that are a pain to troubleshoot.

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8

Forgetting about automation

Setting up services and servers can be accomplished with a few clicks

Even when you first set up your home lab network, automation is your best friend. It’s the best way to set up fresh containers, servers, and other needs while ensuring repeatability. It’s also your secret weapon in case something goes wrong, and you have to start again—which you will do because everyone runs into issues with their home lab, and that’s perfectly fine.

Automating your setup with something like Ansible, which is platform-agnostic, easy to script, and easy to run, will save you hours of frustration for your home lab network. It’s best practice for home lab networking or real-world networking if you want to take your skills into the workplace.

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7

Being lax about documentation

Nobody likes documentation but it’ll save you a headache if things go wrong

Alongside automation wherever you can, the other best weapon for a successful home lab network is documenting everything. This could be inside your favorite Markdown editor like Obsidian or Notion or anywhere you can organize your notes, but you will want to organize them.

As for the why, think about the last time you had to spend time researching a bug, glitch, or a misconfigured service. You might have found a resource that has 90% of the steps, but something was different because it used a different version to the software you had installed, and you had to search for the missing section. That time adds up when you have multiple self-hosted services, and you’ll want to keep track of the steps you used so you don’t spend hours searching each time something goes wrong.

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6

Not setting up a 3-2-1 backup plan

Thinking about your backup solutions should be one of the first things you do

Backups, backups, backups. They’re just as crucial for the networking hardware in your home lab as they are for the data on your servers and NAS devices. Once you’ve set up your networking in your router, hardware firewall, managed switches, or other appliances, export the settings and keep those somewhere that aren’t attached to your home lab network.

Things will go wrong, devices will break, and you don’t want to have to spend hours (or more) setting up your VLANs or firewall rules or network monitoring tools over and over again when they do. By keeping backups of the configuration files, you’ll be back up and running quickly when something goes awry.

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5

Using ex-enterprise gear

It looks great, but it’s power hungry and older hardware runs out of support

While it’s tempting to get ex-enterprise networking gear for your home lab at the significantly reduced prices of decommissioned hardware, it’s often a false economy. Enterprise hardware uses more power than consumer or prosumer networking devices and often needs costly subscriptions to access the more advanced features.

Nowadays, learning about VLANs can be done on fairly modest managed switches, or you could build your own hardware firewall with a few network adapters installed and learn that way. You’ll be able to learn tons of advanced networking in this way, and it will cost you less in the long run. Plus, ex-enterprise gear is often outdated by the time it’s removed from service. Modern hardware firewalls and network switches come with more advanced features, and the prices are far more reasonable these days.

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4

Using .local as your TLD

This might look like a good idea, but it can break things down the line

One tempting thing when using internal DNS is to use the .local top-level domain (TLD) for your self-hosted apps or servers, because it seems to make sense. After all, you’re using local resources in your home lab network, and nothing else should be using that TLD.

However, several things use that TLD that you might not have considered, and you’ll end up running into very tricky issues to troubleshoot. Apple’s Bonjour service uses mDNS for network discovery, as does Avahi on Linux. These services use .local to find local IP addresses without needing a dedicated DNS server. The same goes for any other service that uses mDNS, opening the possibility of multiple devices having naming conflicts.

Instead, try one of the following replacements:

• .lan
• .private
• .internal
• .corp
• .home
• .network
• .intranet
• .site

None of these will conflict with preconfigured networking services, giving you peace of mind as you build out your network.

3

Picking cheap network switches

You want the flexibility and features of a managed switch in your home lab

When you’re looking for a network switch for your home lab, there are a few non-negotiable features to look for. VLAN support, PoE, and support for many devices or users are all important features. These features are also not found on unmanaged switches or managed switches in the budget range. You might also want port monitoring, fine-tuned administration for port properties, network access control lists, and other advanced features. You don’t need the most expensive switches either but don’t skimp on the network switch for your home lab.

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2

Bundling computing and storage on the same device

Compute is cheap, storage is not, keep the two separated for easier use

When planning your home lab network, it’s a common mistake to run all of your services on the device that holds your bulk storage. Instead, it’s a good idea to separate storage from services, because storage costs are expensive, and computing costs are not. Network-attached storage is easy to mount as a virtual drive on other devices, and having a cluster of smaller computing devices to run your services is cost-effective and reduces the strain on your storage device.

Plus, if anything goes wrong while you’re messing around with a compute device, all you need to reimage is that NUC or other small computer. Your main storage is unaffected, and you’ll even be able to get working again straight away once you’ve remapped the network drive.

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1

Sticking with 1GbE wired connections

You’ll get more mileage out of 2.5GbE or faster

Home lab enthusiasts know that wired connections are better than wireless, and that’s as it should be for messing around with servers and services that need high uptime. But the days of gigabit Ethernet are going away quickly, with PC motherboards, network switches, and other networking devices moving to faster Ethernet that’s 2.5GbE or even higher. As it was when Gigabit was taking over from 100Mb connections, plan your home lab network to take advantage of the faster Ethernet speeds from the start.

This could be using a managed switch that has a wide variety of ports, with 1, 2.5, 5, and 10GbE mixed together to use your existing devices to their fullest, while giving you room to grow your network as needed.

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Building your home lab network properly from the start is the best way to learn

It’s tempting to rush into building out a small network for home lab use, but it’s very easy to run into major roadblocks if you don’t spend some time planning first. And while you experiment, take copious notes so that you know what worked and what didn’t for future use. The time you take documenting your home lab network and building automation is time you will save your future self several times over.