Revamping My Home Lab and Network

At the start of the year I enrolled in the Google Cybersecurity Professional certificate program on Coursera.

I've only made it about half-way through so far, but it's been helping me finally build a foundation of understanding around computer networking and security.

Thus I realized how simple and un-locked-down my personal home network was. So I set about an entire network rebuild to give myself fine-grained control over everything.

The major bullet points of this project

• Moved all my equipment into a standard 19-inch rack.
• Installed a patch panel to clean up and make better sense of cable routing.
• God rid of my ISP's router/gateway and Wi-Fi access points.
• Went all in on UniFi Network (router/gateway, APs, managed switches).
• Finally implemented network segmentation using VLANs and firewalls.
• Setup WireGuard so I can access my whole network remotely.
• Installed Proxmox on a Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PC. This will eventually run a few web and database servers so I can self-host my personal websites.

I already have a full UniFi Protect setup for my cameras and NVR, so switching to UniFi for my network feels great. All in all these upgrades were a great learning experience and a lot of fun!

The tower PC case on the left is my TrueNAS machine. It has 14 terabytes of RAIDZ1 storage and 32 gigabytes of RAM.

Before the revamp

Here's what my home network and server area looked like before the revamp.