Home network rack/setup

[forster]

Hello! I know I've made a few threads over the past few months, apologies for the janky paint job and angles here, but I cant consolidate properly until I stop working from home so everything is still a bit temporary. Eventually everything will be on the rack and in the spare room, at the minute I have the rack in the bedroom and the little WD NAS in the spare room, as it's always on through the day and power managed to turn off at night (and back on in the morning). I've hardwired my second floor and it's split at each side of the house between the hardware.

 

So, I was going to go 10gig, I had to drop that idea as it wasnt feasible price wise, Id rather aim for that after getting some of the infrastructure-ness setup. Ive an aggregated connection on the NAS and on my PC, but havent set it up yet to try and get better speeds.

 

My PC is a Ryzen 3600, X570 ASUS board and 32gb of ram. Its pretty nice and a RX590 is pretty smooth. I mostly run this as a hackintosh. I replaced my old logitech speakers with the Edifier speakers shown, they are alright, and take up a bit less space which is good. The rack is a Startech 25u open rack, it was a PITA to build as I didnt believe how heavy and solid it was, I've two power extensions as one is turned off nightly, and the other is left on.

 

Network wise, at the moment I've a Netgear unmanaged switch that Ive had for a while, I have a Unifi AC Lite access point and a Raspberry Pi 4 2gb running Docker, portainer and the Unifi control centre. I want to delay having to buy a £200 cloud key for as long as possible if I dont have to. My next purchase for the rack will probably be a POE Unifi switch. At the bottom of the rack there's a Raspberry Pi Zero W running Pi Hole.

 

The second picture is the spare room, running my current WD NAS, I was running a second tower with FreeNAS but Ive retired it temporarily due to space restrictions. I've a 5 port Tenda unmanaged switch, and the Unifi USG acting as a router. Our modem is downstairs and is a Draytek Vigor 130. Its a pretty nice setup, although the NAS was pulling an IP from the modem which was a pain instead of the router, so I've moved the router to be the first item on the route to the NAS and it's resolved the issue. 

 

This really is a setup following everyone's advice in the few threads that I'd posted previously, just wanted to say thanks and say that it was eventually done  at least one benefit of working from home is that I can tinker in the background when it's quiet. 

[+BudMan MVC]

4 minutes ago, forster said:

My next purchase for the rack will probably be a POE Unifi switch.

Why would it be poe?  You make no mention of bunch of poe devices.. If you only have the one AP.. Kind of pointless to get a poe switch for 1 poe device.. Do you plan on adding more APs, Camera's, other stuff that will be poe?

 

The extra money that a poe costs, could be redirected into just a better switch with more features and or ports without the poe..

[forster]

1 minute ago, BudMan said:

Why would it be poe?  You make no mention of bunch of poe devices.. If you only have the one AP.. Kind of pointless to get a poe switch for 1 poe device.. Do you plan on adding more APs, Camera's, other stuff that will be poe?

 

The extra money that a poe costs, could be redirected into just a better switch with more features and or ports without the poe..

I eventually want a couple of cameras, and I will pick up a cloud key which can be ran POE, as well as the AC access point. I could get a larger unmanaged switch for probably a quarter of the price of one of the Unifi boxes, but I will be moving out of here into a bigger place over the next couple of years so it's basically an investment. I didnt want to buy makeweights that I would have to sell on, Id rather just get the basics in and go from there.

 

That all being said, the 25u is massive, I didnt appreciate the size of what I would want and need, I wish Id gone for the smaller size, but it's going to come in handy down the line as I get more into labs.

[+BudMan MVC]

Unless you are going to get the cloud key G2 plus (that can be a NVR) for your upcoming camera's there is also little need of that.. You can run the controller software pretty much on anything... I have mine running on a ubuntu server VM on my nas..

 

I would never suggest unmanaged switch.. Even if you were getting some little 8 port model... It should be smart/managed - they shouldn't even sell dumb switches any more if you ask me..

 

For a handful of devices the injectors work fine.. If you find yourself with a growing number of poe devices... Sure put them on a poe switch.. But wouldn't be looking at some big core switch model with poe, when you could get better switch without poe for the same price point or cheaper even..

 

example:

The 24 port poe I show for $379 over on unifi store

Show the 28 port, Cisco SG350 for $219 currently at amazon.  This is layer 3 switch vs the unifi layer 2..   Way more more features and function, and more ports even.. For way less money..

 

[forster]

3 minutes ago, BudMan said:

Unless you are going to get the cloud key G2 plus (that can be a NVR) for your upcoming camera's there is also little need of that.. You can run the controller software pretty much on anything... I have mine running on a ubuntu server VM on my nas..

 

I would never suggest unmanaged switch.. Even if you were getting some little 8 port model... It should be smart/managed - they shouldn't even sell dumb switches any more if you ask me..

 

For a handful of devices the injectors work fine.. If you find yourself with a growing number of poe devices... Sure put them on a poe switch.. But wouldn't be looking at some big core switch model with poe, when you could get better switch without poe for the same price point or cheaper even..

 

example:

The 24 port poe I show for $379 over on unifi store

Show the 28 port, Cisco SG350 for $219 currently at amazon.  This is layer 3 switch vs the unifi layer 2..   Way more more features and function, and more ports even.. For way less money..

 

Excellent, thank you - Im over in the UK but will have a look at the given model, I'm more than open to ideas and suggestions, it's all a learning curve