Home Network Rebuild and Redesign (2023)

My rent was raised by 66% by the new building management, so I had to move. The new place is a “two” bedroom railroad apartment (walk into kitchen, then dining room, then living room/bedroom, then actual bedroom). Crucially, there is only one outlet in each of the last two rooms, making it a challenge to plug in everything needed for my home lab. Additionally, there is a radiator right next to all the wires. Since it’s summer, this is ok, but in a few months this will need to be re-evaluated.

This is also an opportunity to revitalize my home network. The first iteration had as many as six raspberry PIs, two ESXI machines, a Synology NAS, and multiple VMs. These had withered away with time, partially because maintaining everything was such a pain (local monthly backups and regular updates especially), and because I was doing less pentesting.

The new network has to fulfill a few more goals, primarily aesthetics and being able to accommodate expansion into the living room. I also would like to set up speakers with an audio splitter to provide seamless sound in all four rooms.

This page will keep track of various updates.