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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Ah that makes sense. I thought I needed the VLAN to separate my network out from the rest.
I am a bit confused about your last paragraph though where you mention 2 APs. Do you mean my private AP and the AP used by the rest of the apartment or do you mean that I have to get 2 APs?
You need VLANs if you want separate networks on the SAME router. But if you have separate routers, then you don’t need VLANs.
You will need two wireless access points. If the router you mentioned has two wireless access points built in, then just set one to connect to the shared network, and the other will act as an AP for your private network. Then the router can be configured to send WAN traffic out of the shared network AP.
If you use a router that only has a single AP built in, then you will need to purchase and additional AP to plug into one of your router’s LAN ports so that it has two total.
Some routers might have the ability to create multiple wireless networks on one router, but be sure the hardware can handle the load. I know my ubiquity UDR can create up to 5 wireless networks on that single device before you run into performance issues.