2023 Complete unifi network (Home Lab) tour

hello all welcome to my channel my name is Ewen Henry and this is Tech in my life so if this is your first time visiting welcome if you're returning welcome back so several years ago I took you guys on a tour of my home network as I upgraded from what was sort of a network to what I considered more of a robust home network well it's early 2023 and it's time for me to go through that process once again now I'm starting off with a udm SE unified dream machine SE special edition a 24 Port switch 2 Flex Mini and unified Pro 6 access point I'm also going to switch over from my current surveillance system which is Arlo to unified protect so I have two G3 instant I have two G4 and one G5 4K Pro um what I'm thinking I'm going to do is probably a two part which is going to be the disassembling of my current rack and installing the new components and then I'll do a separate video on adopting the cameras to unify protect and setting up unified protect and lastly I also decided to go to a rack mounted UPS that's going to be the last component but that's going to be added to the rack as I install these components over here before I get into taking components out the box putting rack ears on and so forth then mounting them to the rack what I'm going to have to do of course is disassemble my previous rack so what I want to do now is just talk about where I started off from where I currently am where I'm going to be and possibly the next step after this so years ago I started off with just a router sitting on a desk sitting on a table in my basement and I was not getting great Wi-Fi coverage throughout the house I also really am a proponent of having as many things wired as possible direct connect through Ethernet that that was my preference so the next iteration of my home network I went to a rack mounted system and what I did was I just picked up a 6u nav Point rack from Amazon and I added my 24 Port switch I had a 24 Port tp-link switch that I picked up then I also of course sat on there my Edge router um and I was using my Edge router it came with a Poe with Poe ports so I was using that along with my um unify access point I also was using I started off a long time ago with a D-Link Nas and then I upgraded to my Synology Nas which is what I still currently have and actually I'll touch on something concerning that a little later terminated all of my Cat6 wiring into a patch panel and I just put a um a wire management system in front of the patch panel so you don't really see the patch panel and directly under my patch panel is a eight Port eight plug power strip the whole purpose of this is to have a a more direct path towards a 10 gigabit home network no I don't need 10 gigabit for all of my components I only actually need it for my Nas but the nas that I currently have my Synology Nas it does not support 10 gigabit there is no upgrade path with that particular Nas and I knew I needed more storage so at one point I was thinking about getting the expansion unit for the Synology now then it just kind of dawned on me why don't I just buy another Nas unfortunately Synology do make a 10 gigabit Nas they make a 4 Bay 10 gigabit nice I think it's the 923 plus so that way what I also gain is the ability to separate um my sort of social stuff which would be my Plex server and family photos and stuff like that onto the nas that has you know the hardware transcoding and the other Nas which would be more of my video files and and Lightroom catalogs and stuff like that onto the nas that support that higher bandwidth of of speed a 10 gigabit networking speed so that's my upgrade path and the beauty of this is it has two 10 gigabit SFP ports that we talked about where I started where I was where I am now and just touching on where I plan on going where I plan on going like I said is just to grab another Synology Nas that way I can go to uh 10 gigabit um at home my plan is to all of the footage that I want to work with I want to be able to store it on the Nas and just work directly from the nas when I'm editing videos and so on so like I said let's take apart the old rack then we'll get everything out the box and we'll start working on the new rack get everything mounted get it all together get everything set up so let's get going and let's get it done [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] foreign s everything is set up now the way I want it I I had some issues um but everything is resolved and I'm finally done now this did take much longer than I anticipated because there were things that I had to purchase and wait for and repurchase and just a few things I didn't think about and a few conveniences that after I realized would make things better I purchased a couple things to just make using the rack a little bit more convenient taking things apart and we'll cover that in a second but as it stands the rack is all set up okay let's start from the very bottom and work our way up at the very bottom the first thing is my UPS from trip light and then the next thing is a eight Port just a power strip after the power strip I have my 24 Port Poe switch directly above that I have a patch panel now everything I mentioned here I'm going to put links to some stuff was purchased on Amazon most things was purchased from Amazon a few things was purchased from b h photography so I'll put in the description as many links as I can then I have the udmse after the udmsc I have another patch panel directly above the patch panel is by HD home run tuner along with my I'm using a Dell wise to run home assistant on so there's that little PC and above that is my Nas and my modem so everything is on the rack I love the way it looks um the wiring on the back I did as best the job as I could with wire management it doesn't look too bad I feel like it could be better but at this point I'm not willing to commit more time and energy just to making the wires look better now one of the conveniences that I wish I started off with from the very beginning is rack studs now I'm not endorsed they didn't send anything to me I just loved the rack studs if you're putting together a rack that should probably be your absolute first purchase it's just a pain in the ass if you're going to use rack nuts to screw in screw out you have to use a screwdriver you have to use a power drill or something like that to get it screwed in and screwed out uh with the racks with the rack studs you clip the studs in you put in the little plastic washer and then you can actually sit the components on the stud and after you sit them on a stud you can just kind of hold them from the back if it's a little too heavy but then you can hand tighten the nuts to make you know it to secure everything to the rack genius idea I love rock studs again from a convenience standpoint definitely the most convenient part to putting this whole rack together anything else oh okay here's some things that I think you should consider when putting the rack a rack together if you're going to do this yourself Cable Management get shorter power cables almost every one of my component came with like a six foot power cable get shorter power cables if you can find ones that have a 90 degree Bend in the in the um plug shorter power cables with a 90 degree Bend um patch cables get some easily flexible patch cables those make things a lot better so the patch panels I purchased use keystones now some keystones are narrower than others the punch down ones that I use they were so wide that they couldn't fit one alongside another in the patch panel so what I had to do was I had to go I had to use a punch down than a regular female female and then another punch down and a female female and it worked fine because I did have some components like my modem that the ethernet ran from the modem into Keystone that's just a plug-in Keystone and then out from the Keystone into the um whether it was the the udmse or the 24 Port switch um so yeah if when purchasing make sure that your keystones will fit all into the rack it all worked out and I think it looks great I really like the convenience of having the female to female keystones because now if I wanted to run more drops I would just terminate them and just plug them into the back and go from there and it makes it so easy to re-jigger everything if you're gonna be taking things apart and putting it back together it makes it super easy also another Pro tip label maker and label all the cables now in my opinion if you're going to use a unify system full system labeling isn't as important as you might think it is because so many devices are recognized and when you go into the unify um user interface and you go to top topology you'll see all of your clients you know what they are there's icons to match up with like 80 percent of them a few of them you might have to match up but for the most part everything is already labeled but what I did was I labeled all of my cables and it made it easier in knowing where I wanted them to go because I wanted specific things plugged into the 24 Port switch and I wanted specific things plugged into the the udm so having the cables all labeled made that that much easier so that's it guys thank you for watching if you found any information here useful please leave a thumbs up if you guys have any questions if there's anything that I missed please don't hesitate to ask questions until then see you guys in the next one

Channel: TeckInMyLife by Euan Henry

Views: 20,900

Keywords: homelab, unifi, assesspoint

Id: ba7kUICmLhs

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023