Kevin's Portfolio

This is a fully fleged lab to explore enterprise IT and Networking concepts. I use this lab to deepen my understanding of systems and how they operate in the real world. With this setup i can experiment, troubleshoot, and deploy my own infrastucure.

Why?

When my home was being renovated from a single-floor to a three-story layout, I took the opportunity to design and deploy a custom network infrastructure to ensure seamless internet access across all floors. This project served both as a personal solution and a hands-on learning experience in home networking, topology planning, and systems administration.

Problems

The original layout of my house consisted of one single floor which makes my isp provided router sufficient for all of the house resident needs. After the renovation Wi-Fi coverage and overall internet reachability became major issues. Rather than rely on consumer mesh systems, I designed a scalable, wired-backbone network with centralized control to guarantee reliability and full coverage.

Not only that I also needed to design a system with relatively low power draw. I dont have funds to run an actual enterprise grade server with massive power draw and noise.

Solution

By considering the cost of the initial hardware vs the cost of running the hardware. I landed on the decision of buying second hand decommisioned office and enterprise equipment as well as low power entry level business solutions.

Stack and Tools

Router: Mikrotik
Access Points: TP-Link Omada
Switching: Cisco Catalyst 2960s
Backbone: Cat6 cabling between floors
ISP Failover: Dual WAN setup with fiber connection and LTE
LTE Modem: Dell dw5821e
Server Nodes: Lenovo Thinkcentre M710 tiny
Server OS: Proxmox VE
Remote Access: Zerotier

Key Features

Centralized router and firewall with VLANs for different users like guest and IoT
Access points with roaming support for uninterrupted connectivity
Local DNS and DHCP management
Remote access to homelab services using secure VPN
Power redundancy for key network gear (UPS)
Speed-tested and tuned for optimal channel and bandwidth use

What I Learned

Planning network topologies for multi-floor buildings
Deploying and managing access points and VLANs
Configuring a Mikrotik router with multiple interfaces and rules
Setting up secure, remote, and fail-safe access to internal services
Deploying VMs and contanerized services using Proxmox VE

Conclusion

This project wasn’t just about better Wi-Fi, it was about designing a reliable and scalable home network from scratch. It pushed me to apply real networking principles (like routing, segmentation, redundancy, and remote access) in a practical, real-world setting.