Building your network is an important part of building your homelab, forming the backbone that underpins the performance and functionality of just about every other device on your network. But networking can be complex, especially when planning with enterprise or prosumer hardware that emphasizes putting control in your hands, and removing the guardrails to breaking things. Proper planning and consideration from the outset of how your network will function, scale, and be maintained can save you lots of pain, time, and troubleshooting down the road when things inevitably break or need changing. So here are some things to consider, in no particular order, when building out your home network.

5 Build with redundancy in mind

Avoid losing time

As your home network gets more complex, the number of things that can go wrong starts to increase, and with it the number of things to investigate when something goes wrong. This means more time spent debugging issues, which is time you might be wasting at a critical moment. The last thing anyone wants is for their file server, internet or media to stop working hours before an exam, important meeting or big movie night. Consider building in some level of redundancy to critical services, like DNS, DHCP or authentication services like LDAP. This might be as simple as running two instances — for example common DNS servers like PiHole or dnsmasq can be easily configured as a redundant, syncing pair. You might also want to consider running your most essential services on your best hardware, such as enterprise grade gear with redundant interfaces, power supplies or a UPS connected.

Alternatively, you could set up your network to 'fail safely'. This means that when certain services like DNS go down, your client devices can keep operating. This might involve something like having access to 'break glass' backup credentials for your LDAP or authentication servers, or setting a failover DNS server like 8.8.8.8 as a secondary option. Planning for these scenarios from the start will save you effort later on, and help avoid the inevitable critical moment downtime.

4 Segregate your devices with VLANs

Each device in its own lane

One mistake people often make when setting up their network for the first time is not properly segregating devices with different security profiles or requirements, or mixing devices that have different performance or functional needs. The most common example of this is placing IoT (Internet of Things) devices on the same VLAN as your personal computers, or placing your homelab servers on the same VLAN as your personal devices.

Setting up VLANs can be complex, and requires you to have a reasonably fancy router of your own, but it is well worth it to keep your traffic secure and segregated. Setting up VLANs opens up a world of traffic flow, security and performance improvements you can make, optimizing your network for the most essential devices and traffic and keeping devices you can't control or don't trust as locked down as possible.

3 Add monitoring for essential components

Stay on top of what's happening

Following up from earlier comments on ensuring redundancy for your critical devices, we'd also suggest implementing some monitoring for your essential components. This can take a range of forms, from using something like Prometheus to scrape metrics from your essential services or simply monitoring their uptime with some kind of web scraper. Setting up a system to monitor your services, export some kind of performance metrics, and alert you when a service is down can save you plenty of time debugging and help to avoid the inevitable problem of a service having gone down, have an SSL certificate expire, or some other silly problem occur just as you need to use it.

2 Proper cable management

Keeping things tidy matters, too

As your home network grows increasingly complex, you'll inevitably end up with more and more cables. This might start to include multiple Wi-Fi access points, multiple switches, devices with several Ethernet ports or even small clusters of Raspberry Pis or other homelab-friendly computers. You'll want to connect all of these things via Ethernet for the best stability, uptime and performance, which can quickly spiral to a situation of having a ridiculous number of cables connected to your router or core switches.

We'd recommend spending the cash early on to pick up a set of cables with a range of lengths, from small patch cables to longer runs, or learning to cut and wire RJ45 (i.e. ethernet) cables yourself — a much cheaper option if you'll be building out a large network. If you're looking to save some cash, you can often pickup leftover spools from of CAT-5e/6 cable from construction or wiring projects - it helps to have some friends in the trades! Having a couple of different colored cables can help save some time labeling, but failing that we'd suggest labeling your ports / cables from the outset. As your network grows, mistakes around which device is connected to which port can be increasingly time-consuming, especially with services like VLANs that are often configured on a per-port basis.

1 Plan out Wi-Fi coverage carefully

It pays to buy a good setup

One common mistake I see in peoples home networks is overdoing it with insufficient Wi-Fi setups. We've all experienced poor signal or speed issues with ISP-provided routers or (god forbid) Wi-Fi boosters, but simply adding more access points is often a poor solution. More access points can cause channel conflict issues, make handing off between access points slow and cumbersome, and generally cause more hassle than they solve if not configured properly. This is especially true when using consumer-grade APs from multiple brands, which aren't necessarily configured to work together in a single unified mesh.

Now to be clear, more access points isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, you'll want to ensure they're working together properly to provide a genuinely improved service. We'd suggest buying a set of APs from the same manufacturer, and ensuring that you follow their documentation to configure them with proper handoff between access points to ensure there are no weird blips of downtime as you move from the range of one AP to another.

Building your lab is a marathon, not a sprint

Now all of this might seem very overwhelming, but don't fret. You don't need to do all of this in one go. In fact, it would be a bad idea to try. Over-complicating things from the outset is an easy way to burnout on a project before you've ever started. It does, however, help to put some consideration into these aspects when planning your network, and have a future road map that's going to scale properly with your needs. The last thing you want is to build out a service, router or element of your network only to realize it needs completely redoing six months down the line. So we'd suggest planning your network well, taking some time to consider how you'll scale, and then taking things step by step on your road to your never-quite-finished homelab setup.