Home Networking
Home Networking
Maybe not the prettiest, but a little cleaner than it was when it began. If I had it to do over, I might use a small 9.5" rack if such a thing existed. Originally I had the Netgear and patch cables in a Square-D circuit breaker box but it seemed unnecessary and a bit cramped with no air flow. I then added the Firewalla and moved the fiber over with all the other gear. I have room to expand but I don't think there is anything else I will ever need to add to this location. I have another networking rack more centrally located in the house. There was also tons of coax here but I coiled it up and tucked it away in case it is ever needed again. I originally wired my house with 2 network drops and 2 coax drops to each wall outlet. This spot services 6 drops to my office, two lines to my main networking rack, and the main internet connection.
10 inch racks are absolutely a thing :)
There are patch panels (usually 8-10 RJ45s), PDUs, shelves, all the usual accessories you can get for a 19" rack, just smaller.
I was able to find a few 10" rack items, but the selection is very limited and the prices are about the same as for 19" accessories. I would replace the three patch panels with a low profile 10" 3u open wall mount rack if I found a setup at a reasonable price.
The fact that you’ve got things sanely separated, and the cable management is decent, I’d say you’re much better off than most who just shove their hardware into a forgotten corner only to wander back when the wifi goes down.
Something is better than nothing. It’s not like it would make sense to get a rack for it. XP
I will say that is considerably better than my current setup, which consists largely of a 20 port switch resting on two pegs on a piece of pegboard over my desk. The router is just plonked on the desk behind my monitor. There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution...
We don't have drywall. Everything on the ground floor is plaster. So no wall boxes and jacks for me. I run cables under the floorboards instead.
What's all the stuff do?
purely guessing:
- ISP box is the grey one to the left where the yellow cable is coming in
- That links to the Firewalla box (I'm assuming is firewall)
- Then the blue box being a netgear switch
- switching to the "patchpanels" probably leads to office, livingroom and serverroom?
- white and black box in down right corner is power distribution
Your guess is spot on. The patch panels only serve the office and "serverroom" though. The server room then distributes to another patch panel in a different attic and all the other rooms.
Pretty nice little setup. I like your patch panel but at the same time would just wire directly myself and leave it unplugged if that's what I wanted to do.
Is there any benefit to the patch panel other than not needing to crimp the Ethernet jack on?
Generally is physical access control, but you don't need that in a residence. You just want it to work.
Yeah, I'm really confused by those. I've never seen it done like that. What's the deal?
How do you like the Firewalla? I keep meaning to pick one up. Looks like you have the gold as well which is what I was looking to get. Seems easier than managing openwrt, pihole, and VPN VMs.
How do you like the Firewalla? I
was going to ask this as well
Coming from DD-Wrt I like it well enough. I needed something to let me control Internet access to all the devices my son uses. I was also having trouble getting full Gigabit Wan speeds with my previous two routers so I wanted to upgrade to something more premium that did one thing really well. I like that it separated my wifi access points from the WAN device. The only real problem I have had with it is enabling encrypted DNS WITH blocking rules. I belive this is fixed now but when I first got it, if I enabled encrypted DNS lookup, it would fail to block some sites it was supposed to be blocking. My other complaint would be that it is too mobile app dependent. There is a web interface but it isn't as full featured as it should be and it requires you to periodically log into the mobile app to give you access to the web interface. It is definitely a mobile first experience.
One thing I really like about it is that I can fail over to a cellular network through my phone if my fiber goes down. This has come in very handy a couple of times.
nice the only serious piece of equipment i find missing in your setup is a ups
Thanks. Up until recently the only thing here to protect was the Netgear router. This space gets pretty hot so I didn't want to put a battery in with it. There is a whole house EG4 18Kpv with batteries being installed that will help protect the equipment though.
Old cable internet guy here. I would shit kittens if I walked into a residence like this. TIGHT.
Thank you. One of the reasons I cleaned it up is BECAUSE the "cable guy" was coming by, seriously. I was paying for Gigabit fiber but only getting 100-200 megabits down. In the past I had gotten over 900, but I would constantly have times where I was getting very slow speeds. I would swap routers and it would help for a short period of time and then speeds would drop again. So I decided to purchase the Firewalla and move the Fiber drop right next to it and the office router (before the fiber drop was in the garage and the router was in the basement). This way everything to test the WAN is right next to each other. This and a network driver update fixed my problems. The hard part now is finding a reliable server to test speeds against. I just checked and it shows I was getting 58 Mb/s down this morning :(
I would strongly consider a couple coats of a fire retardant to the backer board just as a solid safety measure.
You can sort of think of it like this... Every single line that connects to the equipment on that board runs through various other aspects of your house. Any single lightning strike or unfortunate short around any of those little pathways would concentrate back to the equipment you have in this photo... And right now you have that equipment bolted directly to a flammable surface that is attached directly to your home. For sure you would not pass a safety audit if this were in a corporate data center, and I'm not saying that should be your goal. But you may also want to consider your insurance policy might fight you on pay out if this did become the origin of the fire.
You haven't installed a bonding bridge either (which would really be over kill here but you could consider it if you were to upgrade a few of these components later). A couple coats of a fire retardant would be valuable piece of mind... You can use fire treated plywood designed specifically for use in this sort of application as well instead if you wanted though.
You can find intumescent coatings on the internet...
https://www.gaf.com/en-us/products/topcoat-fireout-fire-barrier-coating
Here is an example of a plywood rated for telecom panels
This is great advice and had I thought/known this I might have chosen another backer material. I just used what I had laying around. Elsewhere I installed cement backer board for this very reason. I just didn’t think about this equipment or the wiring being of concern. I will look into the Intumescent coatings.
I would say it is seriously low risk in a residential configuration like this, and not worth stressing to much about tbh. I happen to have a couple years of experience in IT and have had to bring data centers into compliance for this sort of stuff before, and figured I'd share what I know.