Home Lab Network Diagram – First Draft

I thought I’d throw up the first draft of my home lab network diagram:

This will be a reminder that I really need to improve my Visio skills! Hopefully an updated version down the road will show some progress.

It’s fairly accurate as it stands, though I’m wrestling with how best to display layer 1-3 in a single diagram. Maybe two separate diagrams is more suited. Obviously it’s overkill for a home lab, but as with most things that I do on my home lab, the intention is to then scale up to my work network.

Have plenty of stuff I’d like to add as soon as I can, such as:

• A “remote” site consisting of a firewall and one or two VMs, to mess about with VPNs and domains
• Access layer stack (have these already, just not hooked up)
• Some kind of NAS/SAN
• A mock up of a DR site to play about with replication/failover/HA
• A reverse proxy
• A WiFi controller and AP
• A rack!

On a related note, I’ve been trying out the SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper on the 14 day trial. My work network is criminally under documented, and it’s something I’d like to change.

The trial is unfortunately very limited; on one hand I can understand why this would be, to restrict users who just want to occasionally create a static map of their network and be done. But the real value in the NTP is surely to maintain a dynamic map that will regularly update with accurate information.

The trial version will not clearly identify nodes unless you click on them, which doesn’t demonstrate the true power of the tool. It’s promising regardless, and I’m looking forward to running it properly on the full production network. Nasty price tag though.

Now if only our SNMP strings were consistent…