Own Your Network

The internet goes out. Nobody in the house notices. Sooner or later, the little plastic router dies and takes the whole household with it. This book is about making sure that never happens again.

Own Your Network walks you, step by measured step, through designing and building a home network the way professionals build them: a silent, fanless mini-PC firewall running OPNsense at the center, two independent internet providers with automatic failover you can prove with a stopwatch, a managed switch, segmented guest and IoT networks, mesh Wi-Fi demoted to the one job it does well, and a secure road home from anywhere, with no ports exposed to the internet, ever.

No networking background required. You design on paper first, buy the right hardware for the right reasons, build it one working evening at a time, and finish with the tests that prove it, including the most satisfying test in home networking: pulling the plug on your primary provider and watching nothing happen. Inside: dual-ISP automatic failover, measured in seconds and rehearsed on a calendar; a complete address plan, firewall rules, VLANs, and network-wide ad blocking; 95 engineering illustrations, per-part checklists, and ruled notes pages; backups that rebuild the whole network from one file; and remote access with zero exposed services. Understand it. Prove it. Rebuild it. That is what owning your network means.