So I am an IT professional and I’ve moved from help desk to networking to a director level position. I still love networking and security and so my home is kind of a mini lab.

A lot of people have just one physical and one logical network in their home. I have one physical and three logical networks right now. I have this configured this way because I like the idea of having my primary computers separate from my Internet of Things devices and separate from any guest devices.

Router: I don’t have a normal ‘router’ like most people. I have a computer that runs a custom router and firewall software called pfSense. This gives me a lot of control over all aspects of my network. It also helps me to separate my primary computer network from my internet of things network from my guest network.

Switch: This allows my router to provide connections to multiple devices. I am currently running a Ubiquiti US-8. This is a switch that can not only be powered by Power over Ethernet (PoE) but also provides PoE to a single port. In addition it allows for proper network segmentation via VLANs. This was a recent change made as my Meraki switch license was coming due for renewal.

Access Point: This is what provides my wireless networks. I have one SSID for each of my logical networks. My current Access Point is a Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-LITE-US.

For the Ubiquiti gear in order to have the multiple logical networks I needed to either have the UniFi Cloud Key or setup a controller on a computer in my network. I did this on a Ubuntu Server 20.04 virtual machine on my network. This system controls all of my Ubiquiti gear and if I end up moving to a UniFi Secure Gateway to replace the pfSense then it will tie into the controller that I already have running as well.