uplink
Why a classroom runs its own internet
The SPARK room lives in a small rural setting, and the projects that run in it, Minecraft servers, an arcade wall, DNS servers, VR galleries, live dashboards, need connectivity and infrastructure we control end to end. So the classroom has its own uplink: a Starlink dish feeding a dedicated network that exists purely for learning.
The connection is funded by generous donors through the Digital Playhouse Foundation, a registered charity supporting technology education. That matters, because it means the network answers to the curriculum rather than the other way around. If a lesson needs a server, we plug one in.
The point isn't that satellite internet is novel. The point is that the whole stack, from the dish on the roof to the DNS resolver answering a laptop's query, is visible, touchable and explainable to the students who use it every day.
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What's on the network
At the core sits a GL.iNet Wi-Fi 7 travel router with the Starlink uplink behind it. Hanging off that is a small fleet of recycled hardware doing real jobs:
- Umbrel home servers running on recycled Dell OptiPlex desktops, including the Red and Blue team servers from the Minecraft cyber security program.
- Dedicated AdGuard Home DNS servers handling filtering for the whole room.
- An 85" display running self-contained dashboards, including a live Starlink satellite tracker so students can watch the constellation their packets actually ride on.
- Laptops, robots, microcontrollers and whatever else the current term's projects demand.
Nothing here is enterprise gear. That's deliberate. Recycled desktops and consumer routers mean students can be trusted to touch things, and replacing a mistake costs almost nothing.
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DNS filtering we actually control
Content filtering in schools is usually a black box: a distant appliance says no and nobody can explain why. Here, DNS filtering moved off the router onto dedicated AdGuard Home servers, four of them now, so resolution is fast, redundant and, most importantly, teachable.
DHCP stays centralised on the router, which hands clients the AdGuard servers as resolvers, and the Minecraft servers get static reservations so the castles never move house mid-term. When a page is blocked, we can open the query log and show a student exactly which domain was asked for, which server answered, and why it said no. The filter becomes a lesson instead of a mystery.
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Watching it all
A network nobody monitors is a network nobody understands. Uptime Kuma runs on one of the servers, pinging everything that matters and lighting up red the moment a box drops. Alongside it is a homegrown Python subnet dashboard, spark_netwatch, that scans the room and shows what's alive right now.
Students notice things before I do. A server that's gone quiet, a device that's appeared that shouldn't be there. That attention is the whole game: the monitoring wall quietly turns a room full of kids into a small security operations centre.
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The network is the curriculum
Everything else written up on this blog rides on this foundation. The arcade wall is served over it, the VR gallery is published through it, and the Red vs Blue program literally uses it as the battlefield. Next up is extending coverage with a second travel router so the same network reaches further without changing how anything works.
If you teach, the takeaway is simple: a small, honest network you control beats a big, opaque one you don't. Ports, DNS, DHCP and uptime stop being vocabulary words the day students can watch them happen.
Watch the network live
This is the live orbital tracker from the classroom big screen, showing the Starlink constellation right now. The network map of the room itself is public too.
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