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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

I manage a network of a few hundred multi-layer switches, several routers, and a couple thousand wireless access points across a couple dozen campuses.

My home network is an Eero. The network engineer’s kids have no homelab, as it were.

Occasionally, I get the urge to build out a proper homelab but quickly realize I don’t want to come home and deal with the same stuff and put the Eero back in.

It’s not that I don’t like learning and experimenting, it’s just that I get to do that all day at work and I need some work/life balance.

But, I still love seeing these posts and commenters chiming in with their own configurations.

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I like your observation. I think the flip side applies in some cases too: the people who don't get to run fancy network gear at part of $dayjob get some enjoyment running them for fun at home.

And indeed that’s how I got started, temporarily borrowing hardware from my workplace and cobbling it together in my cramped apartment: beige Cisco routers, switches and hubs, sun3 and sun4 hardware, a microVAX II, etc etc.

I luckily had a mentor that let me bend the rules and bring stuff home. If you are a mentor you should also bend the rules for noobs.

I'm in a similar boat as you, but it's across numerous various clients. HOWEVER, I REFUSE to use consumer-class equipment at home when possible. I spend A LOT more, but within some sense of reason, to buy similar business-class equipment at home. Why? Because consumer-class equipment often has bugs I can't easily resolve. On the other hand, business-class equipment has the debugging and logging capabilities that I need to quickly pinpoint and resolve an issue.

In the end, my network at home works better, has higher availability and, for the times that it doesn't, I can quickly resolve the issue and get back to the enjoyment of my home versus being frustrated as to why some consumer-class thing is not working yet again.

I never spent much time with networking so a lot of it was a bit of a mystery to me so I spent the COVID time building out really awesome but overly built network.

I learned a ton and can now actually understand what's going on under the hood!

Since then though I definitely have simplified it a lot because it was a lot to manage but it was an excellent learning experience.

This is my long winded way of saying, network engineers don't get enough praise - that shit is actually really damn difficult to get right at scale!

Best part is debugging networking stuff is always really hard. Opening up a packet dump can help in some cases, but when you're trying to figure out why your nftables rule isn't registering a connection in the kernel connection table, you have to do some fun stuff to figure it out.

That's fair.

In the end though, I got fed up with my consumer gear (Orbi mesh system) never being very reliable, so had the house wired for Cat 6 and shoved a UDM Pro, USW-Pro-48-Poe and 3 U6 Pro access points in and it's been far more stable and problem free than the Orbi, to the point where the kids have stopped telling me "Dad, the wifi sucks!" and needing to reboot the whole thing, which I had to do at least once a month previously.

I feel as I get older I have less and less desire to geek out at home, especially now with Covid/WFH. When I log off for the day I really don’t want to go back upstairs to my home office to do anything.

I used to have a FreeBSD server running pf and jails to partition out services. Now I simplified everything with a little tiny Ubiquti cube that I use an app on my phone to control.

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