I was tired of having poor performance on LAN and poor wifi range despite having a fiber connection and the combo router/modem/ap being centrally located. I was also out of LAN ports. A colleague suggested buying a Cisco firewall on ebay. Around this time I wanted to brush up on my cisco commands and possibly start a lab, so I bought an ASA5510. This would come to replace my ISP's combo device and take over DHCP, DNS, NAT, PAT, routing, and a myriad of other protocols and services, before later being offloaded to other equipment. The firewall lacked 2 things though, enough LAN ports, and wifi. I picked up a 3560G switch next. This allowed me to have 48 gigabit ports, and PoE for what I would need next. I hobbled together a server from old computer parts and threw server 2012r2 on it. Installed hyper-v, and then built a virtual wireless LAN controller. Back to ebay again for some 2602 APs and the first iteration of my network was complete. This was relatively inexpensive thus far, and was honestly cheaper than trying to buy a consumer grade router like one of the higher end Asus gaming ones, and then buy a modem, and a switch. I was also running a full Cisco environment now and could learn in it and use the commands every day. Real world problems start popping up as you actually use your equipment and run into practical problems… which you need to solve. I also now had an enterprise solution for the problems I listed earlier. Wifi reached deep to the edge of the backyard, and into the street in front of the house. I was able to hardwire anything I wanted and still have spare ports. All of the performance issues I had were gone.

It wasn't long before I started realizing I had to treat it like an actual production environment if I wanted a solid customer experience for myself. Sure, a stack of networking equipment next to the desk in one of my spare rooms was OK.. or maybe it wasn't…. but it would look a lot nicer in a rack. It would be quieter too. And I could move it somewhere where there was more space. This quickly required cooling. Throw in some lighting and now I can see while I'm working it…may as well add conduit to the attic to run cables easier. Then I was playing with things remotely and wanted to be able to get into romon mode, or reboot devices, so networked PDU's came. A few power surges and brown outs and an APC UPS arrived. Storage became an issue so a NAS was built. I wanted to know when things stopped working, so I set up monitoring. Then a ticketing system to track things I was working on, because having 50 opera tabs wasn't as efficient. Another server was added for redundancy.

These servers eventually became domain controllers. I created a forest. My windows machines joined the domain. I implemented group policy. Virtual servers became clustered over multiple bare metal servers. Everything was solved by virtual machines and scripts.

What I'm getting at here, is it is a rabbit hole.

You choose how deep you want to go, but this is my story. It's not for everyone, but I don't regret an instant of it. I learned a great deal, and was able to do a ton with what I have. You can start wherever you like and go as far as you want, however, for people pursuing technical careers, I whole heartedly believe this is an amazing path to help you develop yourself, and it can all start with one piece of equipment.