Nathan Reynolds

Getting into your home server from a hotel room should not feel like a hacking project. I have spent the better part of two years hauling travel routers through airports, cruise ships, and Airbnbs, all with one goal: open my laptop anywhere and reach my NAS, my self-hosted files, and my home network as if … Read more

I pulled a 300-foot run of Cat6 through my attic last summer, terminated both ends, plugged in my laptop, and got exactly nothing. No link light, no DHCP, no joy. I spent more time on that single weekend hunting the bad pair than I had running the cable in the first place, and that is … Read more

When the power flickers in our office, the last thing any of us wants is a network closet full of darkened switches and corrupted flash storage. A quality rack-mount UPS for a networking closet solves this problem by keeping your router, switches, and NAS devices running long enough to either ride through the outage or … Read more

Pan-tilt-zoom cameras are the hungriest devices on a surveillance network, and most switches simply cannot feed them. When a PTZ camera starts spinning its motors, zooming its lens, and running a heater in January, it can pull 60W or more through a single Ethernet cable. That is why we spent weeks testing and researching the … Read more

When I first ran ethernet out to my detached garage, I learned the hard way that copper Cat6 gives up after 100 meters (about 330 feet). After two failed cable pulls and one lightning strike that fried a switch through a buried copper line, I switched to fiber. Finding the best fiber media converter for … Read more

When I built my first home lab, I made the classic beginner mistake: I plugged everything into an unmanaged switch and wondered why I could not segment my lab traffic from my family’s network. That frustration is exactly why I started testing budget managed switches. If you are searching for the best managed switch under … Read more

I have been running Home Assistant since 2019 and I have personally burned through three Zigbee coordinators in that time. The first was a ConBee II that kept dropping devices. The second was a CC2652P stick that worked great until I tried to pair more than 40 sensors. The third, and current, is the setup … Read more

I spent the last three months testing eight Ethernet Zigbee coordinators across a 3,800 sq ft home with three floors, a detached garage, and more than 70 Zigbee devices. My goal was simple: find the best Ethernet Zigbee coordinator for whole-home coverage that lets you place the radio wherever signal is best, not wherever your … Read more

When I upgraded my own smart home setup last year, the difference between my old 700 series stick and the new Z-Wave 800 series stick was night and day. Better range, faster response, and the option for Z-Wave Long Range across my detached garage. If you’re hunting for the best Z-Wave 800 series stick for … Read more

If you have started buying Matter over Thread devices, you have probably hit one annoying wall: nothing pairs until something bridges the Thread mesh to your IP network. That bridge is the Thread Border Router, and picking the best Thread Border Router for a Matter setup is the single biggest decision you will make for … Read more