Hello everyone, I will soon be moving into a shared apartment and want to set up a private network for myself so that my tinkering with DNS servers and other networking stuff won’t interfere with the other residents. I believe I have a decent idea of how to go about this but I wanted to get some more feedback from the experts before ordering a router for this scenario.

My situation for my new setup is as follows:

  1. There is an existing network for the rest of the house to which I want to connect my own private network. From my understanding I can do this by setting up my router as a repeater and adding all my devices to a VLAN.
  2. There is no LAN socket which I can use for a wired connection so I will need to set up my router as a WiFi repeater.
  3. I want to be able to set up my own DNS server to be used by all devices in my private network. This is because I have a mediaserver which I access using my domain and I have a split-horizon DNS setup so that my traffic does not leave my home network just to come back in through my cloudflare tunnel.

Based on a discussion I had with another user in the comment section of an unrelated post I believe the MikroTik hap ax2 would be able to fulfill these needs and could also be reused as a simple access point in the future if I decide to upgrade.

I guess my question boils down to this: Am I misunderstanding the technological requirements (e.g. the requirement for the router to be able to setup a VLAN) and is there possibly a better device for my use case I don’t know about?

My previous networking experience is basically tinkering with the settings in a Fritzbox and setting up their propietary mesh network in my old home. I have never worked with a managed switch or VLANs before so going the MikroTik route might be kind of a jump into the deep end of the pool for me.

I appreciate your help.

  • owenfromcanada@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    I’m not an expert, but any time I’ve needed to do this, I set up my own router as a client to the parent router, and I set my router (client) as the DMZ in the parent router. Effectively you end up with two routers that are both (more or less) connected directly to the internet, without the two networks messing with each other. It’s also minimally invasive to the parent router (even old stock firmware has always had a DMZ option).

    The tricky part then is using the wireless connection as your “WAN port,” rather than a physical one. In which case, as long as you can install OpenWRT on it, you should be fine.