Before I built my home lab, I was a bit terrified at the prospect of managing my own server. But after spending months tinkering with different virtualization platforms, I’ve realized that virtual guests are fairly easy to deal with. Heck, even the most hardcore features, including clusters, automation, and distributed storage, aren’t all that complicated once you get familiar with them.

The same holds true for networking, which is often considered the most complex part of servers. Unfortunately, there are quite a few networking myths floating around, and following them blindly can actually make your home lab less secure. So, here’s a byte-sized article to bust the common networking misconceptions in the home lab ecosystem.

VLANs are overkill for a home lab

They may be a pain to configure, but you should use them with smart devices

Between the high prices of managed switches and a complex setup process, virtual LANs can seem like a real hassle. Throw in all the mistakes you can make while configuring your VLANs, and it’s entirely possible to make your management subnet inaccessible – making them a royal pain even when you’re used to managing home labs. However, their real utility comes into light when you’ve got some vulnerable virtual guests or devices in your arsenal.

Take smart devices, for instance. While IoT products may improve your quality-of-life, they are easily the most insecure gadgets you can add to your living space. Sure, you can use Home Assistant to improve your privacy, but these smart gadgets are extremely vulnerable to remote hacks. Isolating them on virtual networks is a great way to lower the amount of havoc smart devices can wreak on your home network should they get hacked, making VLANs borderline essential if you want to build a smart home without compromising on the security front.

You can secure publicly-exposed services by hosting reverse proxy servers

You’ll need additional measures to protect your apps

Even if you’re not into network management, Caddy, Nginx, Traefik, and other reverse proxy servers are a solid addition to any self-hosting enthusiast’s setup. After all, they let you pair TLS certificates with your apps, on top of allowing you to run multiple apps on the same IP address and port. They can also increase your security by implementing the HTTPS protocol for web UIs, and you can add extra authentication requirements to harden your service stack.

But when you’re exposing your services to the Internet, you’ll need a lot more than just reverse proxies. Self-hosting a barebones Nginx server and routing containerized apps through it won’t prevent botnets or hackers from brute-forcing their way into your system. Instead, you’ll want to add layers of authentication, Fail2Ban configs, firewall rules, and WAF plugins to further bolster the security of your home lab.

An SSH connection is pretty secure for accessing virtual guests

There's a lot you can do to harden this protocol

Whether you’re configuring a self-hosted service inside a container or installing packages on your favorite virtual machine, you’ll probably end up relying on the SSH protocol. It’s fairly easy to configure, works well on most operating systems, and is quite versatile thanks to tunneling and automation support.

But if you value security, the default password-based authentication method is far from ideal, especially when you use the same credentials across all machines, like I did in my early days as a home labber. Using keys for authentication is always better, even though it may be a bit cumbersome than relying on passwords. Changing the default SSH port to something other than 22 and configuring Fail2Ban can reduce the chances of brute-force attacks, while disabling root logins will help mitigate the damage if your SSH connection gets hijacked.

An ISP router is good enough for a casual setup

Nah, you should yeet it as far as you can

Wired networks are the backbone of most home lab setups, and while an ISP router provides minimal headache, it’s terrible from a security point of view. For starters, many ISPs can have admin control over your router, allowing them to access your network statistics. Then there’s the problem of security patches, and if your router is a little too old, you may not even receive firmware updates.

Besides removing the ISP’s backdoors and limited updates, a third-party router will also let you bring useful features to your home lab. I’ve already talked about VLANs earlier, but dedicated routers tend to feature better Wi-Fi connectivity, superior encryption standards, and better QoS facilities. And if you want better security, you can arm your router with OPNsense and configure hardened firewall rules.

Always do your research when tinkering with home networks

Aside from these security-related myths, you’ll find a ton of other misconceptions in the home lab ecosystem. Take link aggregation, for example. It’s often misunderstood as a means to double your transfer speeds, when all it does is provide better bandwidth utilization and extra redundancy.

Likewise, unmanaged switches may seem like a waste of money when you need the VLAN management provisions of their managed counterparts. However, their low prices make them better as secondary switches, and you can even isolate them (alongside their connected devices) on the same VLAN by pairing them with a managed switch.