This free network monitor exposed exactly what my devices were sending to the internet
… There's a paid version of the software, but the free community edition is all that someone running it on a home network should reasonably need. …
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Some of my smart devices were sneaking around my Pi-hole, and blocking them was easier than I thought
… These were generic third-party analytics SDKs, so the community blocklists already covered them. …
I switched my whole house to a single VLAN and stopped pretending I needed segmentation
… For any issue, I now had to ask myself first whether it was VLAN routing, firewall ACL, DNS, Docker networking, or the discovery protocol that was the real culprit. …
I thought a 10GbE home networking upgrade was overkill, but it's the best upgrade I ever made
… Only my NAS used wired networking connections, while all other computers and devices in the home used wireless connections. …
Your second Ethernet port isn't about speed — it's about keeping devices apart
…It's about physically controlling what can communicate. A desktop PC with multiple Ethernet ports can use one connection for general network (and internet) access. The second can be reserved for a…
My network kept dropping devices until I stopped over-engineering and checked my firewall rules
…I had hastily added everything to the network without care for what could communicate with what, which IP addresses were assigned, and what rules were configured on the firewall. It was a…
Throwing away your old network equipment is a fool’s errand - here’s what to do with it instead
… Schools, libraries, and community centers frequently operate on thin budgets and will sometimes accept working networking equipment. For students learning about networking or organizations trying to stretch limited IT resources, hardware that feels outdated to you may be exactly what they need. …
Swapping two cheap Ethernet cables doubled network speeds overnight
… Sign in to your XDA account Before I took networking seriously as a younger lad, I would spend hours optimizing my desktop PC. …
The smarter your home, the more your Wi-Fi struggles — here's what to do about it
…You might not notice any slowdown during the morning or afternoon as fewer devices are on the network. However, during evenings and nights, almost every single device in your home is communicating…
I blocked my devices from bypassing my DNS server with one firewall rule
…hard-coded to only communicate with a DNS server, set within their firmware. This is when things can go wrong since that can (and will) override network settings. But there are measures…