Notes Homelab / Networking

Last update: — Initially published:
This following are raw notes, often lacking explanations. I share them in the hope of being useful to somebody and for future reference to myself. See here for more info.

CIDRs and VLANs

The network is segmented by usage and level of trust:

Usage Trust Level CIDR VLAN ID
Infrastructure:
Management Trusted, Restricted 10.51.0.0/22 100
–> Networking –> 10.51.0.xx
–> Server IPMI –> 10.51.1.xx
–> Misc (PDU, UPS, etc) –> 10.51.2.xx
Trusted Services Trusted 10.51.16.0/22 116
Untrusted Services, IoT, Multimedia Untrusted 10.51.32.0/22 132
DMZ Untrusted 10.51.64.0/22 164
 
User Networks:
Primary User Network Trusted 10.77.0.0/22 200
Guests Untrusted 10.77.16.0/22 216

The CIDRs are optimized for quick network identification and to avoid typos (network IPs differ always by at least 2 digits). Network size of /22 provides 1,022 available IPs per network, which should be enough headroom for future needs.

The infrastructure networks (10.51.xx.xx) are for out-of-band management, device management, services, IoT, set-top boxes, TVs, loudspeakers, gaming consoles, etc. Basically for anything that isn’t a personal user device. The nmemonic of prefix 10.51. is “Area 51”.

The user networks (10.77.xx.xx) are for personal user devices, segregated into trusted and untrusted (i.e. guest) devices. The nmemonic of prefix 10.77. is that it stands for July 7th, a date close to my heart.

Hints: cidr.xyz is a great web-based CIDR range visualizer. On the CLI, ipcalc is my favorite (available on Homebrew, apt, yum, etc).

Cable color-coding

Cables going into switches are color-coded as follows:

Color Connection type
White / Gray Default, normal client
Red Management
Green Uplink, trunk, inter-switch, WLAN (i.e. acting as a type of uplink)
Yellow WAN
Orange Reserved (due to ambiguity with mostly orange installation cables)

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