First off, let me say that I’m not here to teach you anything; I’m just sharing my experiences with setting up my home network. Feel free to join in and share your own knowledge about networking!
To start, let me tell you a little about my situation. I live in a three-story house, each floor being around 100 square meters. We have a 100Mbps fiber optic connection from China Telecom, and the fiber optic entry point is located at the corner of the staircase between the first and second floors. Here’s a basic layout of the house:
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Over time, our home network has undergone several transformations. Initially, I placed the wireless router right at the fiber optic entry point. However, due to too many walls and corners, the Wi-Fi signal was weak in the second bedroom and the corner of the living room.
Later, I purchased a VLAN switch and placed it near the fiber optic entry point. I moved the wireless router to the living room and tried using a single VLAN line for multiple purposes. But I wasn’t sure if the switch I bought was faulty or if something else went wrong—it just wasn’t reliable. For instance, sometimes the switch would fail, and the VLAN wouldn’t work properly. When this happened, while the wireless router could still connect, other devices connected to the switch couldn’t function.
Currently, I’ve decided to make better use of an old server I had lying around—GEN8. Instead of letting it sit idle, I thought I’d try using it for software-based routing. At first, I only used LEDE (OpenWrt) for the software router, and I was impressed by its powerful features. However, I found that its Quality of Service (QoS) was quite poor, leading to packet loss and high latency during heavy downloads. After some research, I discovered that LEDE lacked advanced flow control options. Eventually, I stumbled upon LoveFlow, which seemed much easier to use. So, I decided to implement a dual-layer software routing system, combining LEDE and LoveFlow.
Here’s how the network topology looks now:
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I casually connected one of the IO8 IOL4 ports to a wireless router, allowing me to manage the GEN8 via a laptop or other wireless devices when there’s no internal or external network connection. First, I enabled Hyper-V, as shown below:
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Then, I created four new virtual switches:
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The WAN port connects to the modem, while the LAN port connects to the switch.
For LEDE’s network configuration, here’s how it’s set up:
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LoveFlow’s network configuration is also straightforward:
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The WAN port for LoveFlow uses two virtual network ports, while LEDE’s LAN port is dedicated to Port 1. LEDE’s WAN port connects directly to the optical modem, and LoveFlow’s LAN port connects to the switch, the NAS (DSM), and the host computer. With this setup, the network is mostly configured.
Next comes the flow control. I wanted to use LoveFlow’s dual-port virtualization for both flow control andåˆ†æµ (SS redirection). Since we have a separate line for our tenant, I didn’t want their traffic going through the SS. With LEDE and LoveFlow connected separately, LEDE couldn’t differentiate between traffic destined for SS and non-SS traffic. To address this, I equally divided the bandwidth of our 100Mbps connection into two parts: 250Mbps uplink and 6250Mbps downlink. Then, I set up IP-based分æµrules.
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Tenant traffic is directed to WAN2, while I handle the load balancing between WAN1 and WAN2 for my own devices.
In LEDE’s SS settings, I assigned static IPs to specific ports: 192.168.3.2 for WAN1 and 192.168.3.3 for WAN2. Devices with IP 192.168.3.2 are routed through SS, while those with 192.168.3.3 bypass SS entirely.
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Finally, I enabled flow control in LoveFlow, adding two lines.
This completes the basic network setup. The remaining configurations involve port mapping and other fine-tuning.
Additionally, the wireless network is now improved. On the second floor, I placed another wireless router in AP mode, ensuring Wi-Fi coverage throughout the entire building.
At this point, I feel like I’ve shared enough. How about the latency?
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By the way, I also re-sunbathed the virtual machine.
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Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to share them.
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