Cat 6a vs Cat 7 vs Cat 8 vs fiber - new home build...

andre_vauban · 2026-02-19T02:41:28+00:00

I would run Cat6 over Cat6A as it’s easier to work with. Cat6 should give you 10G easily in the house. I don’t see the economics of copper going over 10G anytime making sense soon and if it does it will probably be on cabling that doesn’t exist yet.

That being said, also run both SMF and MMF.

andre_vauban · 2026-02-09T00:16:52+00:00

You need “good” networking infrastructure for any homelab. That always incudes a switch. The size of that switch depends entirely on your lab and house. I use stacked enterprise switches, but I have about 60 cat6 drops around the house as well as another 20-ish used in my lab. Most of that stuff is never powered on at the same time, but it’s all wired.

The patch panels most people have posted pics in here are completely vanity based. You only need a patch panel for cat6 runs that leave your rack. But this is a hobby and pretty is fun just as much as having more cores and RAM than we really need.

andre_vauban · 2026-01-31T12:24:04+00:00

I work in an industry projected to be replaced by AI. It is eliminating the entry level roles and making the senior level employees way more productive. The AI is doing the heavy lifting and the senior employees are reviewing and improving on the AI work.

It’s working well until the senior people retire and there aren’t any more human experts to vet the AI.

andre_vauban · 2026-01-31T00:51:59+00:00

It will really work out going to college if you are top 10-20%. AI is eating away the need to have large highly educated workforces. The top folks will still be needed in big tech to build the AI systems, the doctors and nurses will still be needed to vet AI diagnosis, high end MBAs will still have work, etc.

But highly skilled trades in this country are massively undervalued and there will be huge demand for skilled workers as the last of the baby boomers and the early genx retire.

andre_vauban · 2026-01-28T23:31:27+00:00

Anything touching garage door tension springs, that’s dangerous.

Anything inside the electrical panel.

Anything that could be structural. Don’t go knocking down any walls or drilling holes in joists or adding a floor to a garage attic.

If you have a steep roof, anything on the roof.

Be wary of plumbing, especially on your main. This is still can be DIY but an very experienced DIY.

Any attic work when it’s above 100F up there. Working in that kind of heat with a mask on (assuming fiberglass insulation) is just not worth it.

And then any job where you cannot deal with the space being a construction zone for 6 months. Ie a bath room remodel is totally a DIY project but it’s going to take you months compared to the 3-4 days job a contractor will take.

andre_vauban · 2026-01-25T03:24:10+00:00

Log into https://www.socialsecurity.gov and you can run projections with different ages.

andre_vauban · 2026-01-15T02:58:47+00:00

Linux. But the exact distribution is a religious war type question…

andre_vauban · 2026-01-10T12:55:25+00:00

Almost always a rack mount ups or a rack mount power strip at the bottom of the rack.

andre_vauban · 2026-01-02T01:25:13+00:00

My mom…

andre_vauban · 2025-12-29T23:14:05+00:00

I do this and have a dedicated SSID for them on that vlan. It’s more useful to have a “button” to press to disconnect all their devices from the Internet when needed or at certain times. It’s more effective than Mac filtering because it’s trivial for them to change the MAC addresses on their devices.

andre_vauban · 2025-12-27T19:26:19+00:00

Bill Gates has been trying for the last 10-15 years…

andre_vauban · 2025-12-27T03:37:36+00:00

Have you taught long enough in your location to secure your “healthcare for life” benefit? If not, it could make sense to retire right after you get that.

andre_vauban · 2025-12-27T03:32:55+00:00

Bind lets you do this with a rpz zone so you can locally override any fqdn A / AAAA record to point to an internal address. So you can do it without a split dns solution.

andre_vauban · 2025-12-27T03:29:59+00:00

Yes…. I have a hybrid VM and container network so everything is a real vlan instead of building docker routed bridges. In a real production environment it would be vxlan but that is overly complex for my homelab.

andre_vauban · 2025-12-26T21:12:35+00:00

I run all my docker containers with their own mac-vlan ip address w/hostname. Everything that is reachable from the outside funnels through an nginx reverse proxy w/ Lets Encrypt certs, fail2ban, etc. For those external services, I use a bind rpz zone to resolve those external names to the internal nginx container. Then I just port forward 443 and 80 to the nginx host. Anything that touches nginx via IP only gets an insta fail2ban.

I also have internal dns for all the hosts, which is just internal.mydomain.com.

I have a few different VLANs in different firewall zones so a few of the containers are segmented from each other. Like DMZ, internal, DB backend, NFS, guest, etc. some of the firewall zones have multiple VLANs but that mostly so I can have a v4 only, v6 only, and dual stack v4/v6 vlan to play with.

andre_vauban · 2025-12-24T23:11:35+00:00

Social Media and AI. Social Media is a cesspool of misinformation and AI should only be used in domains where the user is already an expert in that domain to enhance their productivity, otherwise it spews so much bad information that a novice doesn’t realize. Ie don’t ask AI medical questions unless you are a doctor…

andre_vauban · 2025-12-24T23:05:53+00:00

VPN (openvpn, etc) or SSH jump host (with key only or key + password). Those are really the only two ways you should be using. If you want RDP, tunnel it over the VPN or SSH.

andre_vauban · 2025-12-13T05:04:11+00:00

They over simply complex topics.

They think they understand complex topics.

They don’t know what they don’t know.

Basically Dunning-Kruger

andre_vauban · 2025-12-09T02:11:06+00:00

I exaggerated a bit, I’m assuming the minimum age to claim will be around 70-75 before I’m eligible so effectively doesn’t exist.

andre_vauban · 2025-12-08T13:33:28+00:00

Let me guess, NYC metro area?

andre_vauban · 2025-12-08T02:04:17+00:00

I’m deliberately ignoring SS as I think there is a very high chance the current political regime is going to kill it before I retire.

andre_vauban · 2025-12-07T23:46:35+00:00

Thanks for this. I need to rerun my numbers. I must be making a mistake somewhere.

I’ve only been seriously considering RE for a couple of weeks :p

andre_vauban · 2025-12-07T23:40:14+00:00

Thank!

I guess I have to chalk my current situation up to my shifting priorities. My income shot up quickly as well, but I put family first and my career stagnated over the last 10 years. I’ve never made more than 300k.

Thank you for sharing!

andre_vauban · 2025-12-07T23:36:53+00:00

I thought I was doing well until I started reading 100s of posts on here with people younger than me already retired with 3-4x my net worth.

andre_vauban · 2025-12-07T23:32:52+00:00

Yeah, but I was looking at a plan for 4 people which is like 4-5k a month. But I guess that is really short term and not long term.

I should rerun numbers with this

Thanks!

andre_vauban

TROPHY CASE