Introduction

In this article, I detail my experience setting up my newer home network and give little walk throughs of how I went about setting my system up. This is not only for others to learn from but for myself in the case where I forget how I got to where I am now so my apologies if some of it doesn’t make sense aha.

After setting it all up, I believe my process can be broken down into three main sections:

1. SG1100 and PFSense Setup
2. ProCurve 1810-24 Switch Setup
3. AiMesh WiFi Implementation

I’ll try explain as much as I can.

SG1100 and PFSense Setup

So the first thing I did was made sure no one needed the internet at the time I was swapping over from my current setup to the new one as throughout this process you will be unplugging and plugging in cables aswell as restarting the router when you make certain changes.

Once I had ensured no one needed it, I:

1. Powered on the SG1100
2. Disconnect the ethernet cable from the WAN port of my current router and connect it to the SG1100’s WAN port.
3. Connected the ethernet cable from my main computer directly to the LAN port on the SG1100.

Once you get this far, you have access to the SG1100. I ran through the regular setup of the device and finally am using a new private IP address of 10.X.X.X which I find super cool. The setup is pretty simple and if you need a guide on how to set it up, there are plenty of walk throughs on Youtube and other blogs so I won’t explain it here. If you do need any help though don’t be afraid to comment or get in contact with me and I can help however I can.

Once all was setup, my PFSense was up and running. I have customised mine a little with a dark theme though it;s essentially done at this point. On my main PC I have access to the internet and it was actually slightly faster than my usual connection. I use to get roughly 6-8ms ping whereas I have been getting a conistent 4ms and as for my download speed, I use to get anywhere between 85-95Mbps but now I get 100-105Mbps.

Onto the next thing, my ProCurve.

ProCurve 1810-24 Switch Setup

This one was a bit tricky to setup as it’s not already part of a network so you have to manually connect a network that is a part of the default settings of the switch. So the process if as follows:

1. I bought this second hand off of Facebook marketplace so I had to factory reset it by powering it on, then holding the reset button for a few seconds, followed by the clear button for a few more.
2. After that, I connected a LAN port from my computer directly to the switch.
3. Now on my computer, I had to manually connect to the magical network that the switch thinks its a part of. I’m using Windows 10 and it is just in the general networks tab.
4. After I joined the network, I now have access to the switch and it’s web page. The default IP of the switch is 192.168.1.12 so you have to access this in your browser and navigate it to work with the network you will be installing it in.
5. Next you have to change it’s local IP to an IP within your working network range that the switch will be used in. In my case, my current local network IP is 10.0.0.1/23 so I chose an IP of 10.0.0.9 for it.
6. That’s essentially it for the switch. You can now connect the switch to your router and reconnect your computer to the same network. Once your change the local IP of the switch and save it, the switch will be inaccessible from your manually set network. So make sure you change over after updating it.
7. After you can confirm the switch is in your real network, you can continue with any other switch setup like VLANS or anything. Otherwise, you are done!

AiMesh WiFi Implementation

Previously I had an AiMesh system so my WiFi system was already set. All I had to do was join it to my current network as an access point. This was very simple:

1. I changed the previous main device/router to a wireless access point mesh, then connected one of the LAN ports to my switch and that’s it! All the current wifi settings stayed the same and it was just a wireless layer added to the network. All DHCP settings were now run by the new router and new IPs were assigned to all devices.

This was really surprisingly easy to do though within PFSense I have seen a section where you can inform the router were an access point is though I have not looked at it all as my current setup just works and with a busy family always using the internet, I try to have minimal downtime on the network.

Conclusion

The port over to the new network was easier than expected. But now I want to do a lot more setup with VLANS.