Ty Sherback

When something on your home network is continually misbehaving, whether it's a container that can't reach a service a couple of hops away, or a VM's traffic can't reach outside of its virtual adapter, the first line of defense has always been similar. I'd usually load up Wireshark or run a tracert capture to see where things are falling apart. Both approaches are worthy of your troubleshooting efforts, but there's an additional one worth adding to your arsenal, courtesy of Microsoft.

There are two kinds of PC users: the ones who have a recovery drive, and the ones who haven't needed one yet. I was in the second camp for years, until I had a spare USB stick with no home. I recently started dual-booting again, so I decided it was probably a good idea to make a Windows recovery drive out of it, and it saved me from the anguish of a complete reinstall on more than one occasion.

The vast majority of switches with port numbers in the single digits are purchased as a stopgap measure, and mine was no different. I had a shortage of ports on my router and wanted a way to connect my home lab devices and workstation to my network without a tangle of cables, so I purchased an 8-port managed switch. The $25 TP-Link TL-SG108E was meant to do nothing more than patch a quick hole, but as my home lab grew and my network topology evolved, it became the backbone of my entire network.