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Manage your home network like a professional
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Douglas Adams coined the memorable phrase, “looking as if it had been not so much designed as congealed”. He was referring to Vogon spaceships, but the image applies equally to many home networks. After all, very few of us have ever sat down and planned out our connections: in most cases, the topology simply accretes as you acquire new gadgets and services.
That sort of ad hoc arrangement might be functional, but a little hands-on management can reap improved security, performance, stability and ease of use. The good news is that you don’t have to be an experienced IT pro to learn from the practices of enterprise network management, and bring the benefits into your own home. Here’s how.
1 Perk up your network performance
As a rule, you’ll naturally want your network backbone to run as fast as possible. In a professional setting, that would mean hooking everything together over 10Gbits/sec Ethernet (10GbE), but that’s prohibitively expensive for home use; we’d suggest that you stick with regular Gigabit Ethernet where it’s practical, which is still far faster than any domestic Wi-Fi connection. It’s possible to buy home routers and switches that support 2.5GbE and 5GbE connections over a
