Modifying my home network

In this blog entry, I'm talking about a minor change I made to my network to improve functionality because of the limitations caused by having the BT Home Hub 3 router as the core of my network.

What I used to have

For the last 14 months since I moved into my house I had the ultimate in basic networking. I have BT Infinity feeding my house so I have a lovely 40 Mb internet connection arriving at the door. From there the BT Infinity modem modulates/demodulates the internet traffic which feeds into a BT Home Hub 3 Router. The router is also a wireless access point. The router also provides one (yes ONE!) one gigabit port which I had hooked up to my PC in the living room for watching films. There are two other 100 megabit ethernet ports available too, but the current positioning of the router in the house made it impractical to use the wired connections, so everything was over Wi-Fi.

My original architecture

The problems

One of the many things I do on my network is use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) between computers - this applies in particular to my personal data cluster / folding farm which is in my garage. However, whenever I did this, the connection would fail. After much tracing and head scratching, it was the router.

I put it down to an internal firewall blockage that meant the router would not pass the RDP connection through it. But I couldn't see an easy fix because it's not like a port-forwarding issue where I know which PC/ IP address is the intended recipient. With this, I might use any PC to RDP to any other PC. So I didn't want to have a million RDP rules.

Solutioneering

That's actually a word? No squiggly red line under it! Wow! For a second I thought I made that up, d'oh there goes that ray of sunshine... Come on Chris, focus ...

Anyway, ultimately I want to ditch the BT Home Hub 3 for something that is more powerful, read DD-WRT (http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index) compatable. But thats off in the future yet. 

I wanted to have the home network on its own network and only go to the router for the internet access. So this is what I did : the internet still went from the modem to the router, but then the GigE port on the router went to a switch which is where I would then fan out GigE cables to all my devices. Ultimately I will set up a comms cabinet with a full patch panel, but this is step 0.5 implementation for now (and it cost me nothing because I already had the switch).

Modified network

My new switch

The switch that I'm using for the job is a simple NetGear one :

Conclusion

From now on, all network connections will be going into the switch. That's my basic improvement, there's much left to do such as setting up the comms cabinet and running Ethernet about the house, but its a start to an improved network, I've noticed far fewer packet collisions (when both my girlfriend and I would try to log into Lord of the Rings Online I would be unable to log in due to network problems - helped by using a different port).