Making of my Home Network

Finally, I got a broadband connection from Asianet Data Line. Fortunately, they had an optical fiber network around my house. As I wished, I got a high speed connection. I think this is needed to use all the future technologies.

My next task was to setup a home network so that I can share internet among my devices and connect my devices together.

I had the following networking gears with me which was used in my previous home network with BSNL connection.An ADSL modem+ wifi router from DLINK, a wifi repeater from Netgear, 1 TB seagate USB disk, A wireless printer,2 laptops, 2 smartphones.  Now I have an internet TV and plan to add IP cameras and a DVR.

Asianet gave me a Fiber modem which has only a single ethernet port. So now the first task is to share internet among devices.

Initially, I thought, the ISP will assign different IP's to all my devices. So I just hooked up the single ethernet port to my ADSL+router and disabled the DHCP on the router. So the ADSL+router just acts as a bridge switching the data. It worked but with one problem. I can access only one device at a time. If I connect laptop, the internet connection on smartphone is lost.

Now, I have a problem to solve. And I like to solve problems. I realized, I need to connect only one device to internet and share that. The method is to use NAT ( Network address translation). The router will act as a ethernet WAN gateway. But the problem is what I have is an ADSL+router. It is meant to be used with a DSL connection( the telephone jack). And this particular DLINK 2750u doesn't have a designated WAN port where I can connect the ethernet cable from the fiber modem. Initially I was disappointed. This router is going to be an electronic waste in my tool room. I need to purchase another which will support ethernet WAN routing.

As usual, searched in google and to my surprise, I found that the router I have is actually capable of ethernet WAN routing in hardware. But they have this feature disabled in the Indian version their firmware. The other version that support this is the middle east firmware and Russian one.

Since I knew that Russians always reads and writes in their language and I don't know how to interpret, I turned to middle east firmware.I downloaded the firmware from middle east dlink site and flashed it ignoring all warnings that it could brick my router. For me its same since I can not use it unless I get ethernet WAN enabled on this. Its already a brick to me.

Flashing the firmware went well. I have the ethernet WAN option enabled in the web configuration interface. As per the instructions, I connected the WAN side ethernet cable to port 4 and configured the router.

I configured all my devices to access this wifi access point and now I have a shared internet connection. All the devices will have local IP addresses like 192.168.x.x and the router will translate all the internet traffic for me. And all my devices are interconnected in the local home network.

My router supports usb storage and it is shared using samba protocol. So now, all my devices can read/write files to the 1 TB networks share. ( speed is an issue since its USB, i should have an ethernet disk, but it expensive in current market to my use cases).

My wireless printers is on network. So I can print from laptops and phones. Printer is connected to internet so I can even print from anywhere in the world.

I wanted a way for my TV to access the network storage. Another problem to solve.  An here's how I solved it. Mapped the network storage on personal laptop as a drive. Configured DLNA media server on my personal laptop and pointed the library to the network drive. Now TV can read all the media in my network storage with one condition that PC should be up. But that's not a big deal for me.

As expected, another problem pitches in. The printer and the office laptop is at the first floor and wifi range is poor there. So, I hooked my wifi repeated midway somewhere midway between two locations. I used an app which will tell you the % of signal at a location. My wife was cluelessly watching me roaming around the rooms in the house. Now I have wifi range everywhere in my house. And my devices are configured to automatically to connect to the best access point available. So that creates an auto roaming facility. Interesting... isn't it.

Here's snap of my mini home data center.

From left side:
Optical terminal box, 1TB disk, ethernet WAN wifi router, OFC modem.