Ran into this chasing congestion on my own WiFi and figured people here would want to know.

I've got an XB8 in bridge mode with my own UniFi gear behind it. Private WiFi is disabled in the gateway's admin page, and the Xfinity hotspot is off. Xfinity's own help article says bridge mode turns off the private WiFi, so I assumed the thing was just a modem.

It's not. It's still putting out two hidden networks on 2.4 (channel 11) and another on 5 GHz (149). On my desktop they're the strongest signals in the house, louder than my own APs. I've got a second Xfinity line at the other house on the property and that gateway does the same thing on channel 1. Its public hotspot shut off overnight but the hidden ones kept going, so it's not the hotspot.

Asked Comcast. After a pretty painful support chat, their Reddit team told me in writing: "As of right now, the bands cannot be turned fully off when using our gateway equipment." Their fix is buy your own modem. Fun bonus: I got quoted $130/mo for that, then $95, then "nothing changes."

If you want to check yours, stand next to the gateway and look for hidden networks (UniFi/Omada neighbor list, AirPort Utility on iPhone, WiFiman on Android, or netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid on Windows). Don't go by the MAC on the sticker, mine don't match it at all. Then unplug the gateway for a minute and see if they disappear.

If yours does it too, drop your gateway model and what you see (channel, and whether they go away when unplugged). Trying to get enough of these together to send to some tech journalists, since one guy complaining on Reddit isn't a story but a bunch of us is.

A while ago, a friend brought back a few interesting mini PCs from China and was kind enough to gift me two of them.

Figured I'd put them to good use and finally overhaul my home network, cabling and self-hosted setup.

Well, one thing led to another...

What started as a relatively simple homelab has somehow turned into a distributed system with its own AI assistant, compute workers, dashboards and automations. I've been calling the whole thing EVE.

The hardware:

- Main AOOSTAR: Ryzen 7 255, 32GB RAM, 256GB system SSD and 1TB NVMe. Running Ubuntu Server, Docker and most of the core services. Also has an AMD Radeon RX 6000-series GPU for local AI inference. Had it lying around and honestly can't remember the exact model. AMD's naming doesn't help :)

- Second AOOSTAR: Ryzen 7 7840HS, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD. Primarily used for additional compute capacity and background AI workloads.

- Older Dell mini PC: Repurposed for lightweight workloads, monitoring and secondary Pi-hole duties.

- TerraMaster NAS: Around 7.2TB of shared storage for media, backups and various other things.

- Two 10-inch racks: Housing the networking gear, servers and a 10.1-inch touchscreen interface.

What's running on it?

The usual self-hosted suspects: Immich, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Caddy, Tailscale, qBittorrent, Portainer, Homepage, Uptime Kuma, SearXNG and quite a few other containers.

But the main project is EVE.

The idea is to build a locally hosted AI assistant that actually understands and helps manage the infrastructure, instead of having dozens of independent services that don't really communicate with each other.

What EVE does (and what I'm still working on):

- Local AI: Ollama for inference, Open WebUI for everyday chat and Hermes for agent orchestration, tooling and more advanced workflows.

- Distributed compute: Turning the three machines into a small compute cluster, with workloads assigned according to available resources and hardware capabilities. Still evolving.

- Infrastructure management: A central Control Center for monitoring services, managing deployments and updates, and visualising how the different systems are connected.

- News intelligence: A self-hosted news aggregation system that collects, classifies and summarises articles, supports corrections and preferences, and generates personalised briefings. This somehow became an entire project of its own.

- Monitoring and recovery: Health checks, watchdogs and automatic recovery mechanisms. Mostly inspired by the lovely experience of waking up to discover half the house has no internet.

- Hardware interface: The touchscreen in the rack displays EVE's interface and system information, with different modes depending on what I want it to show.

The long-term goal is to keep as much as possible running locally, including AI inference, processing, memory and automation, without unnecessary cloud dependencies.

There's also a rather ambitious list of future projects, including offline voice interaction, physical hardware control, CCTV integration and a few other things I probably shouldn't start before finishing what I already have.

For transparency, a substantial amount of the custom development has been AI-assisted.

It's very much an evolving personal project, not a polished software release. EVE isn't some fully autonomous sci-fi assistant (yet), and privileged operations have safeguards and approval requirements.

There's still plenty of work left, particularly around reliability, usability and making the whole thing manageable without needing a second full-time job.

Is it overkill for a home setup? Almost certainly.

Have I spent far too much time on it? Absolutely.

But I've learned a ridiculous amount building it, and most importantly, it's been fun.

Anyway, first time posting something like this, so figured I'd finally share it with people who might appreciate this sort of madness.

Feel free to roast the setup, suggest improvements, or just enjoy the pictures!

My internet went out to find a cable torn loose from my house, still haven’t found out how, tried to buy some rg6 thread ons and a barrel lug to get me through and nothing. If I’m a dumbass that okay just tell me how to fix it?

So I just moved into a new house last year. I have a “study” that I’d like to be my networking/server room. Unfortunately it’s on an external wall and after looking around the attic today it’s going to be next to impossible to run a bunch of Ethernet through the attic down the external wall and I don’t want to run the Ethernet outside.

I was considering just drilling a 2” hole into the ceiling in the corner and just running several runs of Ethernet down the wall. Doesn’t need to be pretty, just needs to be functional. Are there any concerns/issues with this?

Hey guys,

I’m currently setting up a DNSTT-SSH VPN tunnel on my VPS, but I’ve hit a wall.

The issue: The NS subdomain is completely failing to resolve (showing all red) on DNSchecker, and because of that, the VPN client is unable to establish a connection.

My current setup: * I have configured both the A record and NS record in Cloudflare correctly. * The proxy status for the records is set to "DNS Only" (Gray Cloud). * The DNSTT-server process is active on the VPS.

Since everything on the Cloudflare side seems to be technically correct, what else could be causing the NS subdomain to fail to propagate? Could it be a hidden network layer issue on the VPS or an operating system override?

Any advice or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

SOLVED (kinda?) - through process of elimination, turns out TWO of Ethernet cables went to the same damn 2-port outlet in the living room. None of the other ports in the other rooms seemed to be connected. Couldn’t figure out where the blue wire goes.

>>Original post below<<

Moved into a new apartment and trying to understand how this pre-installed wiring works.

Goal: to put my router in one of the bedrooms but can’t understand how this is all wired and want to ensure FiberJack is wired to that specific port.

The picture is exactly how I found it. It appears there’s some dangling grey/white Ethernet ports and many of them are spliced at the end and not connected anywhere (to the PCB?). I’m assuming this means the apartment isn’t an actually wired to all rooms?

(I confirmed there is in fact connection by plugging my laptop directly into the fiber jack).

I’ve lived at other apartments where there’s a 5-port next to the FiberJack and all you need to do is trial and error plug the fiber Ethernet into one of the 5-ports to figure out where it goes to which wall. This one is stumping me (as a network noob).

What I’ve done so far: I’ve plugged some of those dangling Ethernet heads directly into the FiberJack and found 2 of them go into the living room and kitchen. I have no idea where the blue wire goes.

Thank you!

Hi everyone! I’m hoping someone can help me troubleshoot my home network. I’m comfortable following technical instructions, but I’m not a networking expert.

My network setup
Equipment:
Frontier fiber internet gateway
TP-Link Deco mesh Wi-Fi system (Router mode)
ASUS RT-AC88U (Access Point mode)
Windows 10 desktop PC
Synology NAS and Eufy HomeBase
Home Assistant OS running in VirtualBox on the Windows PC
Amazon Echo devices and other Wi-Fi devices

Physical connections:
Frontier fiber → Frontier gateway → Main Deco → ASUS RT-AC88U → wired devices
Frontier gateway connects to the main Deco via Ethernet.
Deco’s second Ethernet port connects to the ASUS’s blue WAN port.
PC, Synology NAS, and Eufy HomeBase connect to ASUS yellow LAN ports.
Deco provides Wi-Fi to phones, Echo devices, printer, etc.
ASUS Wi-Fi radios are disabled.

Important background:
Before I started troubleshooting my Alexa/Home Assistant setup, my Windows PC could access the internet normally over Ethernet.
However, I already had some longstanding problems communicating between wired and wireless devices.

For example:
My Ethernet-connected PC had difficulty communicating with our Wi-Fi printer.
I also experienced difficulties setting up a Wi-Fi nightlight through its app.
I initially started investigating because Alexa couldn’t discover Home Assistant’s Emulated Hue devices.

During troubleshooting, my PC lost internet access over Ethernet. It hasn’t returned despite reversing the cable changes and rebooting.

I’m not certain which troubleshooting step caused the loss of internet access, or whether it exposed an existing network configuration issue.

Current network configuration
TP-Link Deco:
Router mode
LAN IP: 192.168.68.1
DHCP range: 192.168.68.50–192.168.71.250
Wi-Fi clients use 192.168.68.x addresses.

ASUS RT-AC88U:
Access Point mode
LAN IP: 192.168.2.1
“Get LAN IP Automatically” set to Yes.
Manual LAN IP fields are grayed out.
Administration page accessible at 192.168.2.1.

Windows PC:
Ethernet IP: 192.168.2.90
Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Default gateway: 192.168.2.1
DHCP server: 192.168.2.1
Currently no internet access over Ethernet.

Home Assistant VM:
IP: 192.168.2.234
Accessible locally at http://192.168.2.234:8123

Symptoms
Wired devices are on 192.168.2.x, while Deco Wi-Fi devices are on 192.168.68.x.
Windows PC can access the ASUS administration page and Home Assistant locally.
Pinging 192.168.68.1 from the PC returns “Destination net unreachable.”
Traceroute toward the internet reports “Destination net unreachable” from 192.168.2.1.
Alexa cannot discover Home Assistant’s Emulated Hue devices, although their local endpoint responds correctly.

Troubleshooting already performed
Confirmed ASUS is in Access Point mode.
Confirmed Deco is in Router mode.
Confirmed ASUS automatic LAN IP assignment is enabled.
Verified the Ethernet cable connections.
Temporarily moved the Deco-to-ASUS cable from the ASUS blue WAN port to a yellow LAN port, then restored it. No improvement.
Rebooted the ASUS.
Restarted Windows.
Renewed the PC’s DHCP lease.
Confirmed the PC still receives a 192.168.2.x address.
Verified that Home Assistant’s Emulated Hue service responds locally and exposes the intended four devices.
I haven’t yet tried connecting the PC directly to the Deco to bypass the ASUS.

Questions
Why would an ASUS in AP mode have a 192.168.2.1 address when the upstream Deco router uses 192.168.68.1?
Why is 192.168.2.1 also showing as the DHCP server for my Windows PC?
What might explain the PC losing internet access during troubleshooting, even after restoring the original cabling?
What’s the safest way to restore internet connectivity and get wired and wireless devices communicating properly?
Are there any ASUS AP mode or Deco settings I should investigate before considering a reset?
I’d like to preserve the current configuration as much as possible because I have a NAS, Home Assistant, and security-related devices connected.
Any advice on the best next steps would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I want to move this switch over but I have no more slack on these cables. 2 are 30 ft, 1 50 ft, and 1 70 ft. Could I buy an adapter (if so which one) and a ft of cable to plug into these black cables to the switch?

I have fiberoptic internet. I'm looking to replace the rented Calix Gigaspire Blast model 7u10t.2 my network provider has in my home with something that'll save me money and be self owned.

I'm looking at a Calix Gigaspire Blast 100-05493 but am unsure if it'll work correctly. I've tried scouring the internet for info but nothing is clear. If I used that to replace the rented ont/router would it work and not reduce my internet speeds?

For context, the fiber is coming into my home in a Calix GigaPoint Ont, then an Ethernet cord from that is connected to the Calix Gigaspire Blast mentioned above. From there my personally owned Linksys 6e router is connected to that. I have 2gbps internet.

I have tried plugging the Ethernet cord from my wall unit the GigaPoint and plugging it directly into my Linksys Router. My Linksys did not have Internet after I did that. So I know directly wiring from the GigaPoint to a router will not work.

Any recommendations on what I can do to replace the rented unit with the 100-05493 or another model?

Thanks.

I am an IT sysadmin. My elderly parents live in a retirement community (55+ active / independent living) that has been rolling out Ting Fiber with Eero WiFi routers to all the residents. The speeds are 2Gbps bidirectional.

Ting uses a fiber ONT by a certain manufacturer. Eero routers are made by Amazon. But Ting provides the support for both to keep things simple for the elderly customers.

Immediately after setup, they had a problem with their printer: it kept dropping off the Wi-Fi network after some idle time. This reminded me of an issue I had with our Twinkly lights and some IoT devices at home. My parents brought that printer from their previous house, and it was working fine on the old WiFi router (Linksys).

At first I called Ting on my parents' behalf and asked if there was a way to split the network on the Eero to make the 2.4 GHz band a separate SSID. There isn't. Band steering is enabled all the time, too. The Eero has no web interface; you MUST use a smartphone app, and very few settings are available.

At one point, the Ting rep said he could see the ONT and also the WiFi network name, and identified the name of some devices on the LAN.

This was a huge surprise to me, since Ting's ONT should not have direct access to the Eero ... unless they have a secret backdoor arrangement for support porpoises. Combo modem+router devices from Comcast and Spectrum can see everything, everywhere, all at once, and that makes sense.

Has anyone seen this level of access and visibility across two distinct devices? Could there be an undisclosed backdoor that the tech inadvertently revealed?

P.S.: I bought them a Netgear Nighthawk RS150. It's aesthetically pleasing, very demure and very mindful, and has 2.5GbE. I split the WiFi bands, and the printer is working perfectly.

EDITING TO ADD: I have an Orbi 770 series with mesh. I believe this handles over 2gbps. Unsure if anything else would be needed for support.

Switching from Spectrum cable internet to Brightspeed fiber since they just ran it right along my yard in my neighborhood. My question is, they offer 2 gigs at $59.99 per month or 1 gig at $49.99 which both are dirt cheap compared to the $120 I pay for 1 gig through Spectrum. Do I really need 2 gigs? It sounds enticing at its price but it would be nice to save 10 bucks if I don't need it. I work from home and depend on a strong/fast connection but other than that we are just streaming from several TVs around the house and my husband is a sometimes-gamer. Thoughts on going to 2 gig or is the 1 already enough? I can't tell if what we have now can be faster or not, we do deal with some lagging here and there with streaming. TIA!

Hi all,

Long time listener, first time caller.

I have a small rack at home with some basic stuff:

• Sagemcom Cable modem/router combo (ISP Provided, I am not allowed to use my own - trust me I tried lol)
• Grandstream POE switch
• Mikrotik Router
• Rasberry Pi
• UPS

I did my own cable runs to all the rooms in the house I could, keystones, wallplates, all that jazz. A bunch of Unifi Access Points all over, my PC and and my old PC from 2013 turned into a NAS.

I live in a 3wc sadly, so my ISP sucks, and my electricity provider does too. I guess that's not limited to 3wcs but it definitely adds some additional flavor to the problem.

Power outages are frequent enough that I don't bother resetting the time on my stove and microwave anymore.

This all started last year when I had an old Arris modem die on me after an outage which I understand usually means a surge when the power comes back. It totally died, they sent out a technician and he replaced the old Arris and put a Sagemcom, praising how great the new modem was with Wifi 6 capabilities and all that. I just smiled and nodded before setting the new one to bridge mode and hooking up all my stuff.

In the last year or so, I have had to call my ISP to change the modem 6 times due to outages/surges.

The first time was just port 1 on the modem (which is the only port that works in bridge mode).

The second time was the whole modem. Hilariously before he left, the modem literally died in front of our eyes and he had to go get another new one from his truck.

The fourth time was port 1 on the modem, and port 1 on my router, and my whole switch. I had to buy a new switch and a new router. (This is when I got the Grandstream POE switch, Mikrotik router, and UPS)

The fifth and most recent was port 1 on the modem and port 1 on the router. So bridge mode was out, and I have to buy a new router again.

They seem to have no issue replacing the modems on a regular basis, and its the same tech every time. We're on a first name basis at this point. He mentioned to me that he and all the service techs are sub-contractors for the ISP and they don't actually have access or knowledge of anything going on with the company or its actual infrastructure. I've complained ad nauseum about the inconveniences and he fills out the customer report form and submits it, thats all he can do, and thats where it ends.

After this last outage he said he changed 7 devices on my street alone, and there aren't a lot of people on my street.

From what little I have googled and tried to research, I think what's going on here is the buried coax that supplies the area is not grounded properly, so high current/voltage is zapping my hardware through the coax, through the modem, and killing the modems, switches, routers.

It seems usually only the connected ports are affected.

Anyone with some insight onto what might be causing this? How can I mitigate it? I've thought of putting a cheap unmanaged switch inbetween the modem and router to act as a sort of sacrificial device - that way I'd only have to keep replacing modems (at no cost to me other than my time).

Is there any way I could prove to my ISP that their coax is the problem?

(I will edit the post later with actual model numbers and maybe a photo)

Wondering if someone has follow-up insight for me. I’d posted recently about my network drop-offs (especially while gaming).

You suggested I ping my router and 8.8.8.8 to see packet loss. From that test (and a lot of googling), I was able to identify that when two or more upload-hungry devices fire at once (like gaming as someone starts a FaceTime call, or a phone backing up to cloud) my network bursts right up to my max upload speed (40Mbps), and that’s causing the drop-offs…I think.

I took a look at my router (Asus RT-BE7200) and dove into QoS options. But it looks like applying almost ANY QoS rules causes the router’s CPU to analyze all network traffic to the point that I get like 3/4 of my max download speed. I tried the Bandwidth Limiter and setting my Xbox to like 95% download and upload speeds and drop-offs disappeared — at the cost of every other device getting 500Mbps download instead of the 1GB I pay for.

I even flashed the Merlin firmware to my router so I could try Cake QoS but had similar issues. Adaptive QoS, Traditional QoS and Cake QoS all resulted in download speed drops…I’m guessing from the router CPU over-analyzing traffic.

Anyone know a direction I should head in? Or something to try next?

(Quick network map here: PC and work laptop connected wired to my router. Gigabit switch connected wired to the router, then connected to my Xbox, TV and network security cameras. All other devices like thermostat, phones, etc are wireless)

My house was built in the 1920s but the previous owner went through extensive remodeling back in the late 90s to modernize the house. Recently I want to wire a connection to our upstairs and remembered that we still have our old landline lines that we don't use anymore

After some research i learned that sometimes people have had cat5 installed in their homes if theyre lucky the problem is I have no clue what im doing or looking at

I opened the old landline cover today and im unsure if this is enough wires to be considered Cat5?

Any advise or suggestions would greatly be appreciated!

Hi all. I've just bought a house with a pre-wired LAN connected to a patch unit. I'm planning to connect the patch points to a network switch, but I also want to set up WiFi ap's with POE and a couple of poe security cameras.

I wondered if any one could advise.... Should I connect 2 separate switches to the router I.e. POE and non-poe and direct the relevant patch cables from each switch to the correct points on the patch unit, or should I just get a poe/Poe+ switch and route everything through that?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

I moved to a new house, and I've been running a lot of cables directly to the switch now that I have more control over my walls.

I'm using a TP Link SG2210MP, 8 POE ports, and have a bunch of POE plugged in. I like the Omada controller, which I run in a Docker container, and I went and got 3 TP Link WAPs to cover the house, they're working well. I just used the last SFP port, and now I'm looking at what my next step is.

Does anyone have any recommendations for an upgrade? I'm trying to get an idea of what my budget should be. I'm in Canada if that makes a difference.

Hi all,

First off I'd like to say that I'm no networking expert. I might not be using the correct terminology, so please correct me if I'm wrong but the issue is quite straightforward.

Any kind of game that requires P2P is unplayable and the only solution I've found is using a VPN like ProtonVPN but I'm not a fan of having to pay a 15$ monthly subscription to use my internet. I've tried port forwarding, I've tried UPnP, I've tried practically every solution I could find online and nothing's worked. Pc's hooked up by Ethernet.

The issue goes both ways, so say if I'm the one hosting a game, my friend will disconnected, if I'm joining a friend then I'll lag occasionally. This issue is only present in this specific form, otherwise everything is entirely fine. To give a better example of what happens - voice chat never interrupts and is perfectly fine but everything else will freeze completely, not necessarily lag. Then after 3-5 seconds it comes back up. Can happen once in an hour or 10 times in 5 mintues.

I appreciate ANY, and I mean ANY hail Mary suggestions, questions or anything else. I'll send my routers settings if there's anything I could've missed, and try whatever possible. Ask me to provide any more details I might have missed. This is seriously driving me wild and at this point I'm starting to believe I can't fix it unless I contact my ISP.

Thank you for reading this.

I recently purchased the ASUS BE9400 router to replace an existing ISP router. I noticed the signal was a little weak in my far office upstairs. Instead of purchasing a non specific wifi extender, I read that I could use another Asus router to create a mesh network and extend the signal further. I've opted for the ASUS RT-AX52, however amazon has flagged the item as 'Frequently returned due to connectivity issues' (Ironically, this only appeared after I purchased it). I'm a little nervous as to whether it's even worth me trying it out or if I should just send it back when it gets delivered and purchase a different model?

The BE9400 is downstairs and in the same room for streaming tv shows and online gaming over WIFI. I just purchased the RT-AX52 to essentially strengthen the connection for home working / teams calls upstairs. I'm aware it's a much more basic model compared to the BE9400.

Any advice or guidance would really be appreciated as it's being delivered tomorrow, and I'm unsure what to do.

Thank you in advance.

Hi everyone,

I'm using TiviMate on a TCL Google TV. Some IPTV channels keep buffering when using my home internet, but the same channels work perfectly fine when I switch to my mobile hotspot.

I've tried changing DNS, clearing the app cache, and using a VPN, but nothing helped.

Has anyone experienced this issue? Any suggestions?

Thanks!