Menu
Practical home and homelab network planning for gateways, switches, access points, IP ranges, DHCP reservations, DNS, cabling, and common beginner mistakes.
Instinct-based learning system that observes sessions via hooks, creates atomic instincts with confidence scoring, and evolves them into skills/commands/agents. v2.1 adds project-scoped instincts to prevent cross-project contamination.
Orchestrate building a brand-new feature end to end — research, plan, TDD implementation, review, and gated commit — by delegating each phase to the matching ECC agent. Use when adding a capability that does not exist yet.
Orchestrate bootstrapping a working MVP from a design or spec document — ingest the doc, plan thin vertical slices, scaffold the first end-to-end slice, then TDD-implement, review, and gated commit. Use to turn an SDD/PRD into a running starting point.
Orchestrate altering an existing, working feature to new desired behavior — update its tests to the new spec, change the implementation to match, review, and gated commit. Use when behavior is not broken but should be different.
Orchestrate fixing a bug — reproduce it as a failing regression test, fix to green, review, and gated commit — by delegating each phase to the matching ECC agent. Use when existing behavior is broken or wrong.
Shared orchestration engine for the orch-* skill family. Defines the gated Research-Plan-TDD-Review-Commit pipeline, the size classifier, the agent map, and the two human gates that the orch-* operation skills delegate to. Not usually invoked directly.
| name | homelab-network-setup |
| description | Practical home and homelab network planning for gateways, switches, access points, IP ranges, DHCP reservations, DNS, cabling, and common beginner mistakes. |
| origin | community |
Use this skill to design a home or small-lab network that can grow without needing a full rebuild.
Start by separating device roles:
Internet
|
Modem or ONT
|
Gateway or router NAT, firewall, DHCP, DNS, inter-VLAN routing
|
Managed switch wired clients, AP uplinks, optional VLAN trunks
|
Access points Wi-Fi only; ideally wired backhaul
Servers and NAS stable addresses, DNS names, monitoring
Clients and IoT DHCP pools, isolated later if VLANs are available
Pick a gateway that matches the operator, not just the feature checklist:
| Option | Best fit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ISP router | Basic internet only | Limited control and often poor VLAN support |
| UniFi gateway | Managed home network | Good UI, ecosystem lock-in |
| OPNsense or pfSense | Flexible homelab | Strong VLAN, firewall, VPN, and DNS control |
| MikroTik | Advanced network users | Powerful, but easy to misconfigure |
| Linux router | Tinkerers | Document rollback before using as primary gateway |
Avoid the most common default, 192.168.1.0/24, when you expect to use VPNs.
It often conflicts with hotels, offices, and ISP routers.
Example small homelab plan:
192.168.10.0/24 trusted clients
192.168.20.0/24 IoT and media devices
192.168.30.0/24 servers and NAS
192.168.40.0/24 guest Wi-Fi
192.168.99.0/24 network management
Gateway convention: .1
Infrastructure reservations: .2 through .49
Dynamic DHCP pool: .50 through .240
Spare room: .241 through .254
Use home.arpa for local names. It is reserved for home networks and avoids the
leakage/conflict problems of ad hoc names like home.lan.
nas.home.arpa
pihole.home.arpa
gateway.home.arpa
switch-01.home.arpa
Goal: Keep the ISP router but stabilize a small lab.
home.arpa.Goal: Prepare for future segmentation without enabling it immediately.
192.168.1.0/24 when VPN access is planned.network-interface-healthnetwork-config-validation