How to Set up a home lab connected to a home wireless network

aceman040

Honorable
Dec 31, 2013
3
0
10,510
Hello, First post. I am in the process of building my home lab in the basement of my home. I presently have a Netgear "NightHawk" Wireless R7000 Router for my home wireless network (192.168.1.X) and it gives DHCP IP Addresses. I am worried about connecting my home lab network to this network. In my home lab I have 3 Cisco Routers and 3 Cisco Switches, plus an HP Se1101 Sever. On the Server I am working with Microsoft Datacenter Server 2012 and Hyper-V 2012(my work uses it and I am trying to learn through hands on) and have several VMs configured with: Exchange 2012, Sql 2012, Lync 2012 (I have licenses for the software from the University that I attend). I have assigned the home lab with the IP address: 10.10.10.X. My home lab is not connected to the wireless network; can I connect one of my Cisco Routers to the wireless network? My concern is that I have a domain on the Home Lab and I don't want it to affect any of the users of the wireless network (making them join the domain). I have been trying to find the answer: Will my set up work to make the Home lab private from the Home wireless PC's and equipment, but connected to the internet for updates and other testing? Thanks!
 

rusabus

Distinguished
May 19, 2007
191
0
18,760


You can connect the two networks together without causing any problems. Your home machines won't care that there is a lab network resembling an enterprise network nearby. Since the two networks are in different subnets, your home machines won't really even interact with your lab machines.

The only issue you are likely to encounter is if you setup multiple DHCP servers on your network. Your post doesn't mention having a DHCP server in your lab network, so I don't think this will be a problem. If you do want multiple DHCP servers, make sure to configure your lab network's server so that it doesn't offer IP addresses to your home machines and your home DHCP server doesn't offer IP addresses to your lab machines. Otherwise, you'll have no problems.

Besides, if this is a lab and you're trying to learn, what does it matter if your break stuff? So the people in your house can't get online? Big deal. Use that as an opportunity to learn why :)

--Russel
 

jeff-j

Honorable
Dec 13, 2013
508
0
11,060
One way to go about it would be to treat your home network as an ISP, you could use any router and just plug your home network into the WAN port set that port to dhcp, and on the router add the lan to you 10.10.10.x network, set a port on the router with a static IP address in the 10.10.10.x range, and use that as your default gateway in you 10.10.10.x network. This will allow the 10.10.10.x network to have internet access, and keep the two networks separated. If you don't want to use one of your cisco routers from your lab, you can use any standard linksys, netgear, belkin or any router to do this. But if one of your servers is running dhcp be sure to disable dhcp on the router.