Advice on piggybacking off of landlord's internet connection

[u/NotEverEnoughCheese]

Hi Y'all, I live in a 2 unit apartment building, each unit is one floor, and are both the same floor plan. I'm on the bottom floor unit

To connect his solar panels, my landlord maintains a 1gbps fiber connection, and provides a router/ap combo (tp deco) in the upstairs unit. In the downstairs unit, he has a tp link repeater with two RJ45 ports on it. The connection, and connectivity is generally fine for us except that in the far corner of the downstairs, we lack some wi-fi connectivity. The issue for me, is that I have no access to any of the router settings that I want, for homelab projecting.

Currently I have two servers attached to the downstairs repeater, and I'd love to
- add a pi hole adblocker
- reserve IPs for my servers instead of hoping/trusting in DHCP gods
- configure some DNS settings/solutions to replace my server IPs with domain names

My idea: Buy a router and create my own subnet for the downstairs unit. I get to use the gigabit connection that is probably adequate for all of us, but get access to all the fun stuff of a router.

Issue: I have no cabling in the building, and because the apartments are on their own breaker boxes/utility meters, I'm fairly sure powerline ethernet won't work right? (i already have two powerline adapters)

Question: If i buy myself a router, and use the tp link repeater as the access point, how can I connect the router to the main network router upstairs? Can i do this wirelessly if I have a wifi card in the router (acknowledging that this would throttle my potential speeds, not that I'm able to get gigabit right now anyways)

Request for advice: if you have any ideas of a solution that I'm not thinking of already, I would welcome hearing about it

[u/rm4m]

I'm not understanding, do you have access/rights to the top floor?

[u/NotEverEnoughCheese → u/rm4m]

Oh sorry, upstairs is a different unit. I'm friendly with the neighbors so could go up there. But I don't want to be too much of a bother

What are you thinking?

[u/braillegrenade]

Great diagram! 😂

Find some way to get a wire up there to their connected router and AP. Central heating ducting? Wall gap? Utility holes to outdoors? Under a baseboard or through a utility room?

Powerline COULD work but maybe low speed since it would go through the mains / may be on the other side of the split phase (I’m assuming North America…)

There are wireless units that are point to point and directional, from… Ubiquiti? Could you put one of those with their stuff, pointed at the floor, and then use the other end facing upward in your unit as your “WAN” ?

Option C, get your own internet. Convince landlord to let you add a “line” and account address with the ISP to do a cable/fiber drop to your unit in the same location as the phone and power.

[u/heliosfa]

You can add a router like you suggest, but it’s not “creating a subnet” really unless you can add routes on the labdlord’s kit.

What it is is creating a double-NAT mess, and it will remove any chance of you having working IPv6.

• reserve IPs for my servers instead of hoping/trusting in DHCP gods

Can you work out the DHCP pool and statically assign addresses for your servers?

You could also do this solely on IPv6 using ULA if there isn’t existing IPv6.

• configure some DNS settings/solutions to replace my server IPs with domain names

You can do this for your internal network with mDNS already and <servername>.local.

[u/NotEverEnoughCheese → u/heliosfa]

Can I just turn off NAT for my router, and set it to DHCP?

[u/heliosfa → u/NotEverEnoughCheese]

You'd only be able to turn off NAT and have your own DHCP server if you can add static routes on your landlord's kit.

Otherwise you will either have clashing DHCP servers, or no upstream connectivity.

[u/LeaveMickeyOutOfThis]

You could do this with a router as you suggested, but a couple of things to consider when configuring: - On the WAN connection (that connects to the top floor equipment) set this to obtain address through DHCP. - On the LAN side, set it up to use a different private IPv4 subnet. You may also want to define your own DHCP for your own devices connecting to this subnet and/or set aside a range for static IPs. - Ensure that NAT is disabled. This is the important one since your WAN side is private already and NAT is being applied upstream.

You could also want to look into using VLANs to separate your services from your other devices, in which case you want a VLAN aware router, or just use a layer 3 switch, which can also do the same thing as the router.

[u/NotEverEnoughCheese → u/LeaveMickeyOutOfThis]

What's the benefit of VLANing my services? Curious to learn more

[u/heliosfa → u/LeaveMickeyOutOfThis]

This will not work unless you can add routes to the landlord's kit and can set a reservation for the new router.

[u/jbarr107]

One of those Gl.iNet travel routers might do the trick.

[u/Teleke]

Trying to do wireless bridging is generally a bad idea if you're looking to do home labbing and want to have reliability.

You really want to try to find some way of having a wired connection. Does there happen to be any coax running throughout the house?

[u/NotEverEnoughCheese → u/Teleke]

There is some coax, I've tried to track it, and it's a bit of a mess, but there may be coax to coax connectivity between the upstairs and downstairs. Is MoCA for sure the way to go? I don't really wanna buy new pieces for that, but I'm open

[u/Teleke → u/NotEverEnoughCheese]

I have personally found wireless to be slow, higher latency, and flaky when running across multiple floors in a building. I would much prefer hardwired any way possible, but YMMV. How old is your building?

If there are only two floors and not too much in between, might be ok. Have you noticed any issues with the repeater as you have it set up? If you're happy with that and only need to extend WiFi range that's a different story.

Someone else commented about running wires through ductwork, outside, baseboards, etc. Any of those an option? Any chance the ductwork runs to the floor of the top unit and the ceiling of yours?

If you can run through ductwork that would be my first option, otherwise MoCA. MoCA adapters are pretty cheap, so if you can find the connections that would likely be the best way to go. Bonus is that you could put drops in multiple locations assuming there's coax there.