i have an old cisco switch that i don't use. 48 10/100ports of fun. probably cost a arm and leg to ship.

Imo I would suggest the Dell Power connects for a cheap, beefy home switch. They are all over ebay for a hunnit bucks.

They are stable and have a fairly OK CLI.  It ain't no Nexus 9k,  but if you want gig and port density it's hard to beat.

Thanks for the offer, if that's what you're doing.  

I'm looking for something with a small footprint, but I may pm to you about that, depending on what I find.

ETA: As an update, I ordered a couple of these for $25 apiece.  They seem to get decent reviews.  

I don't have anything that runs on 5ghz yet, so that will give me a reason to upgrade to AC later.

Dell 2724 swwitch is online.  I started setting up my VLANs, and I've done something to kill my VPN.

So I'm trying to get my Echolink up and running, but I need to make some changes.  

First, here's what we need from Echolink:



I would like for the traffic to be accessible to all clients on my network, for the time being.  I'm going to play with this with a few different PCs, plus my main PC gets a DHCP IP.

How can I open it up?  A firewall rule?  Is this safe?

Examples would be helpful...

Be sure to use EC certs as well for your issuing/enterprise CA.

Well, I finally got my VLANs up and running.  I know have 3, 1 for the home PCs and accessory devices, 1 for management and infrastructure, and 1 for guests.  All have their own SSIDs for now, until I get the infrastructure one offline.  RADIUS is up next.  

For now, here's the devices I've used:
Refurbed Core 2 Duo PC running PfSense.  It runs the firewall, DHCP, DNS, and other network monitoring and security packages.
Dell Powerconnect 2724 Gigabit Switch
(2) TP-Link Access Points.  One is the main, and one is a repeater.  I can't get all of the house, due to walls and my main pieces being downstairs.  I may end up putting a wireless card in the PfSense box and drop one of the access points.
Multiple devices, including a couple of RPis, an Odroid C1, iPad, and 5 laptops, multiple phones, and a network hard drive.
Up next will be a server for more "responsive" storage, and some security features.

Just thought I would give an update, in case anyone cared.  

If you have any "smart" devices like the Amazon Cube or a smart TV or smart fridge or toaster or whatever, put all of those in a separate VLAN that isn't the same VLAN as your PCs.

I have a smart TV, but it sucks ass.  Vizio.  I turned off the wireless access and I'm going to get another RPi2 to run OSMC in there, or maybe throw Android on something for Netflix and Prime.

Thanks for the tip, though.  Would a PS3 fall into that category?  I have an old PS3 that keeps dropping connection, no matter what I've used.  It's been running on the same LAN as the PCs for a while, though.

The concern is that there are all of these devices out there now that connect to the Internet.  No one really knows how secure they are and some of them, like the amazon cube have access to your credit card info and since no one really knows exactly how access able they are from a compromised PC then they shouldn't be on the same network. Just to be safe.

OK.  I'm following you now.  I'll check out the PS3 and see what I find.  I've not heard of any major hacks, at this point.

Another option is to reserve a DHCP address and give it 127.0.0.1 for a default gateway/router if you don't want to VLAN all those devices.