LAN for Home

[krazykow1]

I am building a new apartment. All interior walls are made of either brick or Cement. I have worked with the electrician to have lan jacks placed in all rooms and will have the central switch in a closet where the cable modem will be as well. The house will be wired with Cat 5e cables. I am completely new to this all and wanted to ask what Cisco components should I install to secure the home network and provide optimum bandwidth to enable:

• parallell streaming of HD content to multiple rooms,
  
• transfers of files from PCs / Macs to central media servers and NAS
  
• Safe and secure internet surfing
  
• child prorection of surfing (limited to some PCs or rooms only)
  
• fast wireless access through out the whole apartment (considering the brick walls). apartment is 4bdrm and 2000 sq ft.
  

In my current rental, I have a wireless router that does not have stong signal 2 rooms away. This box has the firewall built in. So if I get rid of this to have a switch as the first box after the cable modem, I will have a rather unsecure network. Does anyone have a good diagram for home network with security built into to and links to the right cisco appliances?

[gdeangelis]

Assuming your firewall is adequate and has at least 1 LAN port, turn off the wireless if you don't plan on needing or using it, then purchase a small used Cisco 2950 12 port model on eBay and connect it to your firewall LAN port using a crossover cable. All the ports should be in the default vlan if the config is cleared. This will extend the switch of your firewall /router. This will use the security of your router for the outside and if you want, you can secure access to the switch from the inside network. Dhcp will work fine in this example if you are using it presently.

Alternatively, you can purchase a Cisco 5505 for a few hundred dollars. The config will be a bit more cumbersome but it has 8 built in switch ports, so you would likely only need that single device. You will be able to find config examples online without too much trouble. please let me know if this helps or if you need more information.

There are other devices that will do the same, but since you mentioned Cisco, the 5505 is a good fit if you want to get down to a single device.

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPad App

[Leo Laohoo]

All interior walls are made of either brick or Cement.

There goes your wireless.

[Alessio Andreoli]

Hi Kris,

you would need a survey with a project like that. children protection is a very hard goal to achieve on your own but if you want it you could ask this to your service provider (they can afford proper content filtering devices) or to check which Cisco router can do something "similar" to conten filtering.

I would not buy any particular machine because they are very demanding in terms of power consume but, if you can afford them then definitely

- content filtering device

- cisco router ISR G(1 or 2) with firewall IOS capability ! on ebay you can find 2811 with 9-port eth switch module

- WLC with the proper access points (1142-N are very nice machines)

- license for windows internet explorer or whatever browser you are using ... a very safe internet surfing requires a very well set application layer...

but then again... do you really want to spend all these money ????

If i were you i would only concentrate on the wireless part due to the extension of your house. Maybe:

4 AP-1142N (no WLC but a survey required)

1 2811 on ebay with firewalling capabilities

and that's it. Security updates on your PC automatically installed and filtering directly on your browser the "bad" sites.

If that is not enough for you i'd ask this service to my service provider  rather than keeping spending money for it...

Take Care

Alessio