As I’m in the beginning steps of sorting out my homelab, I’m starting to ask questions I haven’t asked before and come across conundrums I hadn’t considered previously. One of which is how to sort out pi-hole given that my ISP has locked down the router tighter than a tight thing.
As I had been reading about and watching YouTube videos, I had stumbled across Tailscale and the idea of VLANs is a nice one. That coupled with wanting to block ads and a new router seemed to the optimal choice.
Another thing is that I eventually want to get a Reolink POE video doorbell and Reolink E1 outdoor camera for my garden and so I’m trying to think somewhat ahead as the last thing I want is a server rack in my house. Aesthetically speaking.
So I stumbled across all the recommendations for Mikrotik and they’re really reasonably priced, especially compared to the Netgear Nighthawk thing I was looking at for ten times the price.
The Mikrotik HAP AX Lite is reasonably priced, does all the cool new stuff, let’s me set up virtual local area networks, has room for growth and has PoE capabilities. It seems to be the perfect choice. But is it? Because it seems almost too good to be true.
I’m not that picky in terms of routers, as long as it is rack mounted. I happen to use a Fortigate 101E that was no longer needed at work.
While it does support VLAN, I don’t do that on the router, as Fortigate can be a bit of a pain in the ass when it comes to VLAN tagging. I instead have dedicated ports for the various network I serve, each of which connect to the same switch.
On this switch I have each of those uplink tagged as access ports for the VLANs they represent. Then the remaining ports can be tagged as I please. A few extra patch cables, but only dealing with VLAN tags on aruba makes it so much better.
As for PoE, that’s best done on a switch. My Aruba powers all of my access points this way.
That seems to be way more than what I want to do.