I have, in the past, discussed how home technology infrastructures and lab environments are one of the keys to personal career success and how IT practitioners should set a high bar in their own lives and hold their businesses accountable to an even higher bar.\u00a0 I often speak to IT practitioners looking for ways to improve their own education, skill set and r\u00e9sum\u00e9.\u00a0 I propose an approach to building your home network and lab – “Make Your Business Jealous.”<\/p>\n
I mean it quite literally.\u00a0 Why not approach your home network as an opportunity to raise the bar, both on your own experience but also on what you expect from businesses?\u00a0 The approach is an excellent one for changing how you think about your home network and its goals.\u00a0 Don’t just use your home to learn new skills in a “checkmark” fashion such as “learned Active Directory management.”\u00a0 That is an excellent and obvious use of your home network.\u00a0 But we should consider taking this even farther.<\/p>\n
In many ways, this applies far more to those IT practitioners who work in small and medium businesses where it is common to cut corners, eschew best practices, leave work half done and not approve realistic budgets, but it is valuable for anyone.\u00a0 You can take this from the smallest of features in your own home – the physical aspects (like cabling, labeling and organization) and take it very large (servers, services, security, backup, etc..)<\/p>\n
For a real world example, we should begin with the simplest component, cabling.\u00a0 Few people, even IT practitioners, take the time to cable their homes for data let alone cabling it well.\u00a0 This is a big missed opportunity.\u00a0 This is something that is not only utilitarian but ends up adding value to the house as well.\u00a0 And many businesses do a very poor job of this themselves.\u00a0 Even though cabling is not strictly an IT discipline, it is a fringe area of electrical support that is related to IT and well worth using as a physically visible showcase of your home environment.<\/p>\n
Doing good cabling at home, since it is your home and presumably there is nearly unlimited time to do things well, can really be taken to an extreme.\u00a0 I recommend using forward looking cable, CAT 6 or better, so that you can handle flawless GigE today and faster in the future.\u00a0 You do not want your home infrastructure to become dated unnecessarily.\u00a0 Once putting in the effort it is all about doing it “right”.\u00a0 This is a chance not just to run a few cables but to implement a complete cabling plant with over-provisioned cable runs to all parts of the house.\u00a0 Of course you can do this in stages doing just a room or a few at a time.<\/p>\n
In my own home projects I ran four cable runs to nearly all rooms with some like the master bedroom and living room getting more like six or eight.\u00a0 This may sound like a lot, but in reality for a well wired home, it is not at all, as we will see.\u00a0 You want to run more cabling than you are ever likely to use now, while putting in the effort, both because it is good practice and because it is simply impressive.\u00a0 Having extra cabling means an easier time keeping things organized and more ability to flexibly change things in the future.<\/p>\n
Running the cables in the walls, up through an attic or down through the basement or whatever is appropriate with well managed cable runs is best.\u00a0 In my own house this was the attic with large “J” hooks keeping cables in place.\u00a0 Be sure to label all cabling very clearly.\u00a0 This is another chance to go above and beyond.\u00a0 Install nice wall jacks, label every jack and every cable in every jack.\u00a0 Make the physical cabling plant as organized, impressive and manageable as possible.\u00a0 All it really takes is a little time and effort and you can have something that you are really proud of and that you want to show off.<\/p>\n
Where the cables run to, of course, is a matter for some discussion.\u00a0 Maybe you will want to have a networking closet or even a server room.\u00a0 Having a good place to store your home networking gear can be a wonderful addition to a home lab.\u00a0 A patch panel for your cable runs is ideal.\u00a0 Do everything “right”, just like you would find in a dream office environment.<\/p>\n
Good cabling will allow us to move as much as possible from wireless to wired in the home environment.\u00a0 Wired connections are faster, more stable, less management, potentially more secure and improve the performance of the remaining wireless devices by lowering the wireless saturation levels in the home.\u00a0 If you are like me your home network consists of many devices that have regular Internet access and are often wireless but can be wired such as desktops, video game consoles, Internet television devices, smart televisions and more.\u00a0 Many or most of these devices can easily be removed from wireless which can only be beneficial.\u00a0 Save the wireless for mobile devices.<\/p>\n
A cabling plant, of course, needs something to attach to.\u00a0 A good switch will be the true heart of any home network, or any network at all.\u00a0 If you have a large home you could easily need a forty eight port switch or even need to look at stacked switches.\u00a0 A small apartment might use sixteen ports.\u00a0 Size will vary by need.<\/p>\n
In acquiring a switch it is a good time to consider not just size but features.\u00a0 Adding PoE (Power over Ethernet) now is ideal allowing for even cleaner cable management and a yet more impressive network.\u00a0 Wait till you see what else we consider adding to our home network that might leverage PoE.<\/p>\n
Also this is a time when we can consider more advanced features on the switch.\u00a0 Rather than just using a traditional unmanaged switch we can look at nice, rackmount switches that are either smart (web managed) or fully managed which is excellent for getting broader switch experience.\u00a0 We might want to add a guest VLAN, for example, for visitors who need Internet access.\u00a0 If you have a guest bedroom in the house, maybe those Ethernet ports should be VLAN’d as guest access all of the time, for example.<\/p>\n
You are going to want to monitor that closet too, no doubt.\u00a0 Once you start to put nice equipment in there you will want to keep it safe.\u00a0 Perhaps temperature and moisture sensors that communicate onto the network?<\/p>\n
Most home networks live and die on their wireless capabilities.\u00a0 This is a place to really shine.\u00a0 Instead of cheap “all in one” networking gear with anemic wireless that is stuck in the most useless corner of the house you can use your shiny, new PoE cabling plant to put high quality, commercial wireless access points in the most useful point(s) of your home (and considering placing them on the grounds too, if you own multiple buildings or open space.)\u00a0 Centrally managed units are very affordable and can make for a very fast, robust wireless network and can make having guest wireless access very easy as well.<\/p>\n
Next to consider, since we have such a robust cabling system in place already, is security.\u00a0 Why not add a camera or two to watch the outside of your house or the front door?\u00a0 You can use PoE cameras that are centrally managed.\u00a0 Look for business class solutions, of course, not consumer cameras and software available at the local store.<\/p>\n
One of the bigger and more interesting home projects to consider is a full scale VoIP PBX.\u00a0 This can be a great and interesting project, one of the few really good uses for running a server at home that will be really used as a “production” service.\u00a0 A home VoIP PBX can make it easy to have separate extensions for family members, rooms or purposes. \u00a0You can have features like individual voicemail mailboxes, a house intercom, front door intercom, room to room calling, wake up calls, video conferencing, free calling for other family members (outside of the home), guest lines, multiple lines for simultaneous calling and the ability to make and take calls while traveling!<\/p>\n
Once we have a PBX in the home installing physical phones throughout the home, on PoE of course, is the next step.\u00a0 Phones can be very useful around a home, especially a larger one.\u00a0 Having real phones to manage can be very educational and certainly lets you take your home to another level of IT.<\/p>\n
No server closest would be complete without features like a domain controller, home web server (why not have a guest website for visitors and a wiki for tracking your home projects and information) and the biggest home systems – storage.\u00a0 Traditional storage like NAS or file server can be very useful for storing private photos and video, music and document collections, movies and other media.\u00a0 DLNA streaming can make an audio and video library available to the entire house.\u00a0 Traditional storage such as SMB and NFS can provide high speed, protected mapped drives available to the computers in the home.\u00a0 And more modern storage techniques like “cloud storage” can be hosted as well.<\/p>\n
Of course all of those workloads can be virtualized and run on a server (or two) and run in the server closet.\u00a0 If you are incredibly ambitious this could include features like high availability or fault tolerance, although these will generally push costs into a range often impractical for home use by nearly any standard.<\/p>\n
And the pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance is, of course, backups.\u00a0 Use real backup software, several enterprise options are even free for home-scale use.\u00a0 Taking good backups, testing restores, using different media, backup strategies and backup types (such as images and file-based backups) can really showcase the reliability of your home network.<\/p>\n
Don’t forget to go beyond running systems into monitoring.\u00a0 Log collection and analysis, bandwidth monitoring, system monitoring, load monitoring and more can be added for completeness.\u00a0 Think of all the things that exist, or that you wish would exist, in an ideal office setting.\u00a0 There is rarely any reason not to bring these same technologies into your home.<\/p>\n
Beyond these steps there are many places that one could go to make a home network.\u00a0 Features that might be interesting for you.\u00a0 Go crazy.<\/p>\n
Our goal here is to raise the bar.\u00a0 Do at home what few businesses do.\u00a0 Building an amazing home network, one that is really used, beyond building a great home IT lab, is valuable for many reasons.\u00a0 A great home network is more than just an amazing learning experience, it makes for a perfect interview conversation starter, it is a “portfolio” piece demonstrating skills in cradle to grave LAN design and management, it shows dedication and initiative to the field and it sets a bar to be used when speaking to businesses.<\/p>\n
Go ahead, don’t be afraid to make your business jealous of your home network.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have, in the past, discussed how home technology infrastructures and lab environments are one of the keys to personal career success and how IT practitioners should set a high bar in their own lives and hold their businesses accountable to an even higher bar.\u00a0 I often speak to IT practitioners looking for ways to … Continue reading Make Your Business Jealous<\/span>