Home Network Upgrade: Part 2

🔍 Important

This post is part of a series. Also see part 1.

Second Access Point

Because the first access point I deployed has a weaker signal than the Wi-Fi router it replaced, I need to deploy another access point to cover the basement. No new cables are getting installed - I’m just adding another access point along the path that already exists. See the diagram below for a better idea of what I’m talking about.

Nearly all devices in the basement computer lab are wired, but I also spend a lot of time down there. I need phones and laptops to have a reliable signal while I’m working away from a wired network port.

I removed the wall plate where the old Cat5e cable terminates and crimped an RJ45 connector to the end. Next, I installed a bracket in place of the old wall plate, plugged the access point in, and snapped it to the wall. On the other side of the cable, I put a PoE switch between the router and the access point to replace the old single-device PoE injector that powered the first access point.

*Old wall plate in the computer lab. The cable from the router terminated behind the RJ45 keystone.*

*After removing the plate, installing the bracket, and crimping on a new RJ45 connector.*

*Completed access point install. All wired computer lab traffic must pass through the AP before reaching the router, which isn't ideal but it works fine for my use case.*

Machine Assembly

Owed to 10+ years of experience assembling computer and server hardware, putting the machine itself together thankfully wasn’t too difficult. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take many pictures of the build process. I’ll come back and add more pictures later the next time I need to take the router down for maintenance.

Picture taken during testing. The M.2 drive is clearly connected, but cannot be found by the motherboard.

The motherboard needs to be replaced soon because the one that I purchased ended up being defective. Despite supporting the interface and protocol, none of my M.2 NVMe drives are detected by the board. The Proxmox hypervisor and router VM will temporarily live on a SATA SSD that I had to harvest from a different machine until I get a replacement motherboard that can actually detect my drives.

Proxmox Installation

I did a standard Proxmox install after assembling the machine. Nothing special or of interest to note here.

Initial Router Setup

Now that all the new network devices have been installed and assembled, it’s time to get an initial setup working.

It’s important to note that my goal at this stage is to get the traffic flowing again rather than making configurations that will address the concerns I listed in the first post. I’ll cover most of those configurations in the next post once the network is working and stable.

A screenshot of the OPNsense dashboard. Attentive readers might notice that I have already started configuring VLANs.

On the Proxmox side, we need to create a VM for the virtualized OPNsense install to use. It’s important to check the Start at boot option so that the router automatically starts itself after I power on the host machine. You also might be able to squeeze some more performance from the VM by changing the CPU type to host, but I decided against this because I will be swapping out the host machine’s processor for a different one later. Otherwise, this part of the install mainly comes down to giving the VM the virtualized hardware that it needs.

On the OPNsense side, we can pretty much follow the installation wizard and use default settings out of the box. I selected USF instead of ZFS during the installation as all snapshots will be handled by Proxmox. After completing the install, the only step I had left before I could connect to the Internet again was to spoof the old router’s MAC address on the WAN port to get around any potential ISP device activation shenanigans.

Networking Enclosure

I was gifted an enclosure for the core networking devices so that everything isn’t sitting loosely on a shelf in the basement. I think it looks and feels much more manageable with everything organized and contained.

It will likely be mounted on the wall near the breaker box at some point in the future.