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.