My new, (mostly) Mikrotik network setup

I bought a new router and now my home network is mostly Mikrotik.

Before I start talking about the network setup, let me lay some context of where I am: There are two main factors why my current network setup is configured in such a way:

• Sometime in the future, maybe end of this year, maybe early next year, I will be moving to my own house, and there will be a full sized server rack in a separate room.
• In my current flat, I have thick concrete walls and the room layout makes it basically impossible to lay cables between them, also we are renting it so I do not want to modify it too much.

Also I am big fan of Mikrotik, as they are a relatively small, Latvian company and I know they make very good and fair priced network products. Their software has a steep learning curve, but I want to push through it, I think having this skill will be very useful both in my homelab and professional experience.

Here is the diagram of my network, made in draw.io

The network entrypoint is my small town ISP, providing Internet in the form of a Ethernet twisted pair cable coming from the wall of my flat. In every other place where I lived it used to be either coax or fiber, but here it’s just RJ45 from the wall. The cable goes to the ETH1 port of my newly bought Mikrotik (deep breath) RB3011 U1AS-RM.

I chose RB3011 U1AS-RM because it has a) 10 copper ports and one SFP fiber port for my planned use of light in my future network, b) is rack mountable for my planned massive rack, c) it has a screen! and d) it is in general a beautiful overkill.

I bought it used for ~400PLN (95EUR) and would you believe it, on Vinted.

My new router. Note the temporary “rack mounting”. And fighting dust is a hopeless battle in a flat with a large dog. The router LEDs are covered with black tape.

The ISP uses PPPoE to authenticate users, and the RB3011 handles that part. I configured PPPoE using this Youtube video. However, after doing it exactly as in the video, only my router had Internet access, but not its clients. This forum thread helped me solve this issue.

Out of the ETH10 port of the router goes the link to my Audience Mikrotik Access Point.

I have two Mikrotik Audiences connected in a mesh, but in my case it’s more of a Wi-Fi bridge. The second Audience is placed in the office room. As I said before, I can’t really put cables between the rooms here, and the walls are thick and disastrous to Wi-Fi signals, especially the 5Ghz ones. When using cheap, basic Wi-Fi routers I would get a lot of dropped connections and that was just not acceptable when working from home as I do.

Configuring the Audiences to work as a mesh was rather straightforward, the Mikrotik’s site has instructions on how to do it, it boils down to pressing the WPS on the first Audience and then holding the WPS button on the second one. However, I had to modify one setting after pairing using WinBox, and I am not sure if that is a flaw in the default configuration, or if I did something wrong. In order to make the connection an actual Wi-Fi bridge, I had to add ETH2 to the default bridge interface on the second Audience unit.

Mikrotik Audience living on top of my office book rack

This allowed me to use the second Audience unit as a wired router for devices in my office. The two Audience talk to each other over Wi-Fi, and they even have a dedicated 5GHz link only for intertalk, and I have to say that it works much better than any previous Wireless router I tried in this flat.

So I said, the second Audience works as a sort of wired router, a cable from the ETH2 port of it goes to my NETGEAR GS108LP PoE+ switch. I chose that switch most of all for the PoE+ part, as it allows me to power my Raspberry Pis without using USB-C power supplies. I have right now four Pis running, three in my Kubernetes cluster, and one running as an ADS-B receiver.

The switch is also rack mountable, and the ears can be rotated 90 degrees, so for now it’s bolted to my bookrack.

The switch and the Pis.

BTW, My Kubernetes cluster is no longer running K3s as I got tired of maintaining it, for now it’s only running BOINC, and I am considering taking it apart and testing out the Pis as security cameras in my future house.

Apart from the Pis, that switch also handles my homelab server, and my work laptop which I rarely move from its place, so it’s wired.

There’s also one other PC that I did not mention previously, there’s a Lenovo ThinkCenter USFF PC running my Home Assistant and working as a Zigbee gateway (I described it in detail in the Using a Lenovo USFF PC as a Home Assistant box blog post). It’s connected to the first Audience AP and not to the router directly because, well, let’s go to the issues list.

Issues

Those are not exactly issues, more like “things I need to learn properly, for now I am a bit scared to touch them”. Having internet access is a sacred thing in this household, and I don’t want to have problems because I mess up my internet setup to a point of no return. I will sort it out properly, but not today :)

The main issue I have with my current setup is that the first Audience unit, the one connected to the router is a DHCP server, and so it has its own separate subnet, different from the one of the router, and so I would not be able to reach things connected to the router from, say, my laptop. I want to have a flat network with a single subnet handed out by the RB3011. As I said, this is something for the future. I guess all the network engineers will now sneer at me for procrastinating doing such a trivial change, but hey, I’m just starting in the realm of networking, and choosing Mikrotik as my platform is playing on hard.

The second issue, much easier to fix, is that I am running out of Ethernet ports on my switch :) My long-term plan is to get the CRS305-1G-4S+IN SFP+ switch and move some of my devices to 10G fiber.

Bottom line

And that is the current situation. Not ideal, but much, much better than it was when I moved in here.

Not only do I have better Wi-Fi, but also the girl who lives here is now my Wi-Fe.

Ok, that was awful.

Anyyyway, speaking of the future house network, I am hoping that there I will be able to just use a single large AP and ditch the Wi-Fi bridge. This should make any configuration much easier. I will also need to look into LTE solutions, it is very probable that I will move to the house faster than fiber comes to the village.

I can’t wait to write more blog posts as I am building the network in my new home, almost as much as I can’t wait to live in it!

And that’s basically it, hope my blog post was inspiration to some of you, and thanks for reading.

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