38 (I guessed 45)
14 (Jeez, there are only 5 of us!)
24, but lots more, probably equally many, have gone to sleep and aren’t connected right now.
I think all of them do. I can’t actually identify any that don’t, even it if it is just to check for firmware updates!
4, My network console, my NAS console, my sonicTransporter console and Roon ARC are all enabled for outside access.
2
None! 
OK, apart from my Unifi console the other two* I found were Synology Connect and Roon ARC. No?
Go to the top of the class! 
OK. The Rossini clock is going to have to wait. I know where my next paycheck is going!
I am chartered engineer with decades in digital/IT. I design and sell audiophile switches which are based on facts (RFI noise in particular) not on dogma, and any arguments in to which I enter are backed and non-fallacious.
If you remove the word switches from your post, or the inverted commas from “audiophile”, I’m happy to engage in a conversation about other aspects of secure and high performance networking but not if you’re going to bring your own fallacious arguments in when setting the agenda!
Love and peace.
I stopped using Synology Connect some time ago (I can’t remember whether it was Synology that had a vulnerability and that’s why I killed it or QNAP that had a vulnerability and I pulled it “just in case”) and I’ve never enabled Roon ARC …
…I did think I might have messed up and still had 8 Tuya Smart Plugs that logged into my Tuya account but I must have blitzed them at some point as they’re running Tasmota now and only talk to Home Assistant.
Oooooof … I can say with all honesty that THAT really doesn’t do anything for me and I’ve bought the most silly stuff for the most silly of reasons!
Hi Nick,
I hear you … however I UNDERSTAND that @struts001’s plan behind this thread (if you read our other conversation from earlier today) is to try to have a discussion about setting up a network that is simply reliable rather than flaky, trying to dispel any networking myths and at the same time excluding the audiophile side of it (which isn’t part of building a reliable network) for no other reason than it starts to make passions run high.
(Is my understanding here correct @struts001 ?)
TBH with given one of the comments in the other conversation that was made by @struts001…
…I got the feeling he was pro-audiophile switches but was just wanting to keep that out of the discussion as that’s a subjective “quality” discussion rather than an objective “reliability” discussion.
Cheers
P
Hi Nigel,
Apologies if I have offended you, that really wasn’t my intention. I don’t subscribe to dogma when it comes to audiophile products. I try to listen first and judge later, and sometimes, if I get really interested, I break out the scope and measure. I am not an ‘audiophile skeptic’ and I have audiophile cables and an audiophile switch in my system and I have found them to contribute positively to sound quality. So nothing I said was intended to denigrate the category or make any insinuations about the validity or performance of products within it.
While I believe this is a valid product category many others don’t, and in my experience these ideological discussions can get quite heated. Since that wasn’t what I wanted to focus on in this thread I thought it would avoid a lot of off topic discussion to try to sidestep it. I started this thread so I take the liberty to decide what I want to talk about. I don’t see any need to change my wording or my punctuation. Again, I apologise if it upsets you but I believe (hope) that was just a misunderstanding.
If I present a fallacious argument feel free to call me on it. I would do the same.
Namaste.
Haha, sorry, I always forget irony becomes a bit hit-and-miss when you’re not face-to-face.
Spot on Phil. I don’t think Nigel had read the other thread and took my comments out of context, but then again I probably din’t express myself clearly enough. That happens too. I really didn’t mean to tread on anyone’s toes.
Thanks Phil and Strut.
I do understand that the thread is about computer networking rather than audio specifically, and I do understand that the intention was merely to head off any diversion of the thread into audio concerns.
There is no reason on earth network switches in audio should become a topic of ideology or belief; I simply read (misread, apparently!) your opening post as setting out your own ideology so felt the need to constructively challenge it. I agree that it was a misunderstanding on my part, and I apologise in return.
Now, back on topic.
Apologies, this is correct. I’m just getting up to speed and saw this thread ahead of any others. Apologies if I’ve missed some important context.
I’m away from home right now but love the idea if the “connected devices” challenge and will take that on! I can almost guarantee I’ll be surprised… though at least I don’t have a “smart” (inverted commas deliberate) fridge or washing machine in the mix!
I’ll give as much detail as I can… it’s worth bearing in mind we have our home, guest, iot and work networks split out (my wife and I work a lot from home).
There are some disadvantages to doing this (one is that HomePods try to follow your iPhone’s network and uses the WiFi password from your phone to do so, so you have to ban them from the networks you don’t want them joining), but it works and it saved us from unmitigated disaster when my previous employer got hacked and the malware not only encrypted their servers, but most employees home machines and servers too.
Right now, we have about 80 connected devices, but it varies as some (such as weighing scales) only connect when needed. We have ten PC-like devices between my wife and I, plus two Kindles for the children.
We do not allow services to ‘dial-in’, such as Roon. I may enable a VPN connection in future (mostly in case there is a network issue and I need to connect to the out-of-band management interface to fix it while travelling), but this will sit on a separate 4G network connection.
A bit belt-and-braces, but there have been a few times, including this weekend, I was very grateful we planned for the most improbable scenarios 
No harm, no foul. I should have been clearer. This only goes to prove my point about finding networks easier to understand than people. 
I decided to do a “audit” of computers - just computers - in the house and I got to 52 including Raspberry Pi’s … since then I’ve also added a 27" 2014 iMac that I was given as faulty. 
It is quite remarkable just how much stuff you do have nowadays that is network based!
P
I’m almost scared to do mine! I think I have maybe a dozen devices… yeah, I know, in for a shock, right?
I live in a “faraday chamber” of a house. Corrugated steel siding, 1.5” drywall/gypson board 8-12” steel I-beams, elevated living space. rebar reinforced concrete filled cinder blocks ground level. Main living area is raised 15ft due to being in hurricane alley outside the levees of New Orleans. That should give a good image. Mesh systems never worked well for obvious reasons so I went to a Unifi network
UDM SE
16 port managed switch (for camera expansion)
8 port managed (for all living room electronics)
2 wired AP’s upstairs
1 meshed IoT 2.4 network AP for living room electronics (dCS, PS5, Apple TV, Trinnov etc) and Tesla outside
2 meshed AP’s downstairs
Separate SSIDs
Main- all mine and wife’s phones, iPads laptops etc
IoT
2 kids have their own
Each isolated from the others
In total about 30-50 devices depending on how many of the kids are at home. 2 at University 1 at home. It’s amazing how many there are once they are all tracked down.
I’ve got years of reused cat3-5 network cables which is my weak point. Awaiting a monoprice delivery tomorrow for the weekends project updating all cabling to an overkill cat8, price was negligible with 6a so I went for it for the increased shielding
A few thoughts on some basic housekeeping steps.
Always change any Admin passwords on hardware such as Routers, Printers, NAS Boxes, Switches (the more capable models have a web interface with an Admin user) because the defaults are all out there on the Internet for anyone to find and use in a hack attempt. Sometimes it makes sense to create a new AdminUser and disable the default as the name Admin or Administrator is ubiquitous.
NAS boxes like Synology and QNAP are under constant attack, here’s a useful guide from QNAP, the advice applies in a more general ways so worth a glance even if you don’t own a QNAP.
https://marketing.qnap.com/download/17748/?version=en-pdf
Setting a Static IP linked to a devices MAC Address is a useful tool, I tend to set them for things like Printers, NAS boxes and Streamers, if something is playing up and intermittently dropping off from being visible, setting a Static can help - sometimes 2 devices “pull” the same IP address from the Router (or whatever is doing the DHCP role) and one of them “loses” and drops off the network.
A proper firewall is worth considering and doesn’t need to cost mega bucks, Home versions of Untangle, pFsense or OpenWRT are all free/cheap. I use a Ubiquiti Dream Machine because that’s what we supply at work, works well with a nice user interface these days.
Reading up on Virtual Networks, VLANs and tagging traffic plus Wi-Fi SSIDs is useful as part of segregating the traffic on your network as are Guest Networks and isolating foreign/visiting devices. A mate is into bikes, his pal brought a laptop round to connect to his new bike, I was on a train and Zen Security called me to let me know they’d blocked my mates Internet as it was firing out thousands of Spam messages - from the laptop as it turned out it was riddled with Malware. If he’d connected it in his house rather than the bike shed (loose term, it has a bike lifter onto the first floor 
) which had it’s own broadband the Malware could have jumped onto his home computers.
Any Dial In/Port Forwarded traffic is locked to the Public IP or IPs of the trusted people allowed access, typically to remote access cards like Dell iDRACs or HP iLo, I have multiple work Servers at home running various Apps such as our ticketing system.
Nice Jeremy. Now you go to the top of the class. I have something quite similar and that is one of the areas I was going to come onto further on. My virtual networks are Main, Boy, IoT, Audio, and Guest, each with their own associated wireless LANs. My idea is that:
I hadn’t considered the home vs private angle. I use my work laptop as my primary client and it has access to pretty much everything. So if any threat entered via my work network I could potentially be hosed. Food for thought.
Yes, Apple, maybe with the best intentions, has created a whole raft of challenges for network administrators. The first was the introduction of private WiFi addresses which screws up MAC address authentication as well as a lot of convenience features like device identification functionality. Then there is the whole keychain thing. Jeez, what a headache! Still love them though…
Belt-and-braces is good. That’s what a lot of this stuff is about, but here I’m clearly preaching to the choir!
That was indeed one of the points I was trying to make, even if I suspect you might be an outlier here. But I don’t want to speak too soon. Keep 'em coming folks!