On my home network, I host a few public facing services that my family and I make use of when away from home such as Plex Media Server. On Plex I have limited the bandwidth remote users may use to be slightly less than the maximum of my upload speed so my home network is still usable. I am using my own registered domain name which I use to refer to devices on my network (both internally and externally, which you can read more about with another article I wrote).
Consumer Routers Most everyone should be familiar with the standard consumer-grade wireless router. Many Internet Service Providers lease modems that have a built-in wireless router, which most consumers are likely to use because it is convenient. Other users choose to purchase their own wireless routers to have a better quality wireless router and/or to have more control over their home network.
Ideally the router should be placed in a central location in the home.
A few months ago, I switched to using my own cable modem instead of using the ISP provided modem/router, and I wanted to access the web interface for the cable modem status. Another reason was to change the default password if it had one since default passwords are not secure.
The default web address for cable modems is typically http://192.168.100.1. Perhaps that is a common default IP address to avoid potential IP address conflicts with standard consumer grade routers which often default to 192.
One nice thing about utilizing more advanced router features is that you can do neat things such as using your own domain name in your home network. This allows you to refer to devices on your network by using the device name/hostname followed by the domain name. For instance, server.homenetworkguy.com could refer to a host named “server” that exists on the network using the domain name “homenetworkguy.com”.
Of course, depending on your configuration, you could just use the hostname “server” to access various services on your device(s) such as a fileshare, which will be shorter than including the domain name.
After the long journey of learning more about IPv6 and how to enable it on my home network (see my page for detailed info), I discovered that I broke some functionality. When you have IPv6 enabled alongside IPv4 in a dual stack configuration, IPv6 will often take priority – after all, it is newest protocol intended to replace IPv4.
I have created a network for my IP security cameras that is isolated from the Internet that I use as baby camera monitors.
