Networking

• Cascading Switches at Home: When It Works, and When to Use a Star

  How to spot shared uplink bottlenecks, reduce failure dependencies and prevent switching loops, and when rewiring around a core switch helps.

• 2.5GbE and 10GbE at Home: What to Upgrade and Where the Real Bottleneck Is

  Before buying multi-gig switches: what your cables can carry, which links actually benefit, and how to find the bottleneck that limits your transfers.

• Self-Hosted DNS: Choosing Pi-hole or AdGuard Home, and Where Unbound Fits

  The role each tool plays, choosing your upstream trust model, encrypted DNS vs recursion, and the setup mistakes that take the whole house offline.

• VLANs at Home: A Practical Plan for Trusted, IoT, Guest and Lab Networks

  Why to split a home network, a four-VLAN starting plan, default-deny rules between them, same-VLAN isolation, and the mistakes that break printers and casting.

• Wi-Fi 7 for Normal Homes: What Actually Gets Better, and When to Upgrade

  What Wi-Fi 7 adds (320 MHz channels, multi-link operation, 4K-QAM), which of it you'll notice at home, and the checks to do before buying a new router.