FINALLY rack mounted my Ubiquiti UniFi gear

this is my network closet I know not a pretty site at all quite frankly it's actually embarrassing especially given that I've made quite a few videos about networking gear and stuff so in this video we're going to try to address that and try to make this place look like an actual Network closet now I know this setup looks very messy and unorganized at the moment but at the time when I set it up it actually made sense because I didn't have that much equipment all I really had was a cable modem and an ASUS router so this bookshelf Arrangement worked perfect for that setup but over the last few years I've kind of grown my network and I have a lot more equipment now and as a result the bookshelf is no longer cutting it and it's become a bit of a mess so in this video we're going to clean that up but before I take it apart let's take a look at what I have here so that we know what we're working with so I have my modem here from my internet provider it's a fiber modem and then that goes into my udmsc which is my router here and then on the middle shelf I have two switches one is a 10 gig switch for my high performance devices and the other is a 24 Port gigabit switch all of these are unify equipment and then on the bottom shelf there I have my NVR here which is connected it to all the cameras around the house and right below that is my Synology Nas which is my main storage device for the house and then even underneath the Shelf itself I actually have a rack mountable UPS you can see at the bottom over there but I'm not going to be putting that on the network rack only because of how heavy it is and I don't want to stress the network rack that's going to be mounted to the wall and also because the depth of the UPS is actually longer than the depth that my network rack will support so either way it's going to stay on the floor so aside from that I actually have a 12 Port patch panel attached to the Bookshelf which I've actually outgrown and that's part of the reason for this project is I'm going to put in a couple of Keystone patch panels and that's going to help me accommodate for any future changes and also not to mention this patch panel here was one of the ones that you have to punch in the cables which kind of limits what I can do whenever I need to make changes aside from what's on the bookshelf itself I have two of these computers one is actually my true Nas server which is a secondary Nas I have and the other is a proxmox server now I may make a future video about what I'm running on these two computers as part of a home lab tour but I'm not gonna go into too much of that in this video now I do plan on putting these two computers underneath the network rack to kind of consolidate the space a little bit I actually plan on mounting the network rack on the wall over here and what's special about this wall is that I actually have access to the other side of this wall through this door over here so let's go over and take a look so on the other side of the wall it's actually not finished so because of that I have easy access to all the studs so I don't really need a stud finder I could just basically look on the other side and also I have easy access to the attic through that hole over there to run any cables I need to I actually ran all these cables myself for when I first set up this place these are all the Cat5e cables that I've run and this is a fiber cable coming from my workstation I actually made a video about this cable when I ran this I fell through the ceiling so if you want to have a laugh check out that video I also have easy access to my isp's fiber cable coming into the house so this is that one and all this goes through to the other side through a hole at the bottom that I made now that hole might not be what I use for this time around because I do want the cables to come in closer to the network rack so I'm gonna have to make another hole somewhere around here probably now this Arrangement over here is actually the main reason why I have my network stuff where they are because I just have easy access to everything from this side of that wall so the first order of business is to assemble the rack I got myself a 12u open frame wall mountable rack I want an open frame because the closet already has some cooling issues during the summer so I didn't want to restrict any airflow by getting a closed off rack the rack was pretty easy to assemble it came in four pieces and it came with all the tools I needed to assemble it as I was busy assembling the rack my cat decided to use the box that the rack came in as his new bed once I finished assembling the rack I took some measurements to get an idea of what I'm working with and then it was time to bring out the handy dandy laser level to support the rack on the wall I cut two pieces of two by fours to the exact length of the space on the wall with the help of the laser level I aligned the first piece of 2x4 and used two three inch screws to temporarily hold it in place then I used the rack measurements from earlier to align the second piece of 2x4 and repeated the process I then went on to secure the 2x4s for good using some four inch lag screws with washers I pre-drilled some pilot holes before going at it with an impact driver by the way I didn't realize how loud the impact driver would be in a small room like this so I brought out some earplugs after the first couple of lag screws I also went on to hand tighten the lag screws with a socket wrench to seal the deal I do have two more four inch lag screws that I'll be securing to the middle stud but I'll only do that after I hang the rack so that it doesn't get in the way now that I had a solid backing to hang the rack on I went on to partially screw in a couple of two inch lag screws to the top 2x4 to hang the rack unfortunately I forgot to hit record before actually hanging the rack so I don't have any footage of it then I took a couple more two inch lag screws to secure the bottom part of the rack to the 2x4 behind it with the Rack in place it was time to screw in the remaining two four inch lag screws to secure the two by fours to the middle stud after that it was just a matter of hand tightening everything with a socket wrench to make sure it's solidly in place and with that this rack was finally ready for me to start mounting some of my gear but before I mounted anything I first wanted to tackle the cabling like I said I want the cables coming into the room closer to the rack to reduce use the amount of cable clutter so to do that I need to make a new hole on the wall I'm going to use a 2 Gang wall plate bracket to make the hole so that if I ever need to cover up the hole down the road I can just easily use a blank faceplate after I marked up the wall I used an oscillating multi-tool to cut the drywall and secure the bracket into place since all the existing cables were punched into a patch panel the next task was to label each cable and remove them from the patch panel this is a key step because the last thing I want to do is retrace all the cables to see where they go once everything was labeled I went over to the other side of the wall and pulled all the cables out and passed them through the new hole I made then came the task of re-terminating all the cables to Keystone Jacks some of the cables from my security cameras were actually pre-terminated with RJ45 ends so I just use RJ45 Keystone couplers for those cables for everything else I had to manually punch down every cable into new Keystone Jacks this was by far the most time consuming and tedious part of this whole project I use my punch down tool to punch down all the cables this part alone probably took me about an hour and a half to complete once I had all the cables terminated onto Keystone Jacks I was finally ready to mount the first items to the rack which were the patch panels now if you ever mounted anything to a server rack I'm sure you know the pain that comes along with inserting cage nuts if you can come out the whole operation without injuring your fingers that's a major win I used a flathead screwdriver to help guide some of the cage nuts into place it really shouldn't be this hard the patch panels I got were actually the only items that didn't come with its own cage nuts and screws but my rack did come with some spares so I used those for mounting the patch panels once I had each of the patch panels mounted I inserted the Keystone Jacks into the spots that they needed to go I strategically put the Keystone Jacks in places to ensure that I have the cleanest cabling possible once everything was said and done and some of the placements did change throughout the process as I was putting things into place just to further optimize the cabling oh and I use these long red cables to temporarily keep my network up and running while I worked on everything I know at this point it's starting to look messy but that's because of the temporary cabling once the patch panels were in place the next thing I installed on the rack was a 2u shelf on the very top some of my devices are not rack mountable like my NVR and the modem from my ISP so this shelf will be used for just holding those types of items speak ing of my NVR that's the first device I'll be putting on the rack I actually decided to orient the NVR backwards because everything I need to access is actually on the back and it just made sense to have that side face forward for cabling I got myself a whole bunch of six inch patch cables and the goal is that everything on the front side of the rack should be connected with these cables to have a minimalistic look after the NVR was in place I then moved on to my isp's fiber modem the modem is designed to stand up vertically but thankfully the top of the rack is open so there wasn't any clearance issues the modem outputs to a RJ45 Jack but instead of running the cable directly from the modem to my udm SC I'm going to connect it to a keystone coupler on the patch panel so that I can once again use the short 6 inch cable when it comes to connecting to the udmse the next thing I needed to address was power now ideally it would have been great to have a one updu mounted to the back of the rack but since this rack only supports mounting on the front side I instead decided to wall mounted industrial search protected to the stud behind the rack this surge protector connects to my UPS so everything on the rack will have backup power whenever there's power glitches at the house and since I live in Texas that is actually not a rare occurrence with the surge protector in place I could finally move on to racking my unified gear all the unified gear comes with rack mounting accessories included in the box which up until now I had never touched it includes everything from cage nuts to Rack years so I started off by installing the rack years to my udm SE my 24 Port gigabit switch and my 10 gig aggregation switch then I inserted the cage nuts and proceeded to rack the equipment just like the Keystone Jacks I strategically chose where to mount each device to ensure that I have minimal amount of cabling in the front right below the top patch panel is where my udm SE is going this step was a little difficult to do just by myself but I managed to hold the device with one hand while tightening the screw with the other my udm SE is what powers my three axis points in the house with Poe so those are terminated on the top patch panel to be able to easily connect to the udm SE with short cables before mounting the next device I decided to add another keystone jack to the bottom patch panel to terminate the fiber cable from my workstation I had extra fiber Keystone Jack's left from when I ran the fiber cable a few months back so it only made sense to do that then it was time to mount my 24 Port gigabit switch this is what most of my wired devices connect to and I terminated all of those devices to the bottom patch panel to make sure I can use those short cables going into this switch after that I moved on to my 10 gigabit aggregation switch this is what all my high bandwidth devices connect to like my Nas devices and video editing workstation and three of those devices are actually going to be below the rack so it made sense to mount this switch below the other switches to optimize the cabling and the fiber Keystone for my workstation is on the patch panel right above it so I'll be able to use a short fiber cable for that too once all the networking gear was racked up it was time to connect everything before my family got mad at me for not being able to watch Netflix and my short cable strategy worked beautifully here I did however have to use some long DAC cables to connect the switches to each other so I ordered some shorter DAC cables and will address them later in the video when they arrive once I turn the power on everything lit up the way it was supposed to at this point I also went ahead and patched the fiber connection from my workstation to the 10 gig switch I then mounted another Shelf at the bottom of the rack and this shelf is for holding my Synology Nas since that's another device that's not rack mountable on its own the Synology also connects to my 10 gig switch so the proximity to the switch Right Above It is ideal for minimalistic cabling purposes at this point the work was mostly done it was just a matter of doing a bit of cleaning up although there wasn't much I could do about the cabling behind the rack I did push out some of the excess cabling back through the hole I made to reduce the Clutter a bit after that it was time to tidy up everything below the rack I positioned the UPS on the floor in a way so that I could put my proxmox server on top of it and put my truna server right next to it against the wall in the future I may use my woodworking skills to build something custom to put the ups and the computers on but for now this will do at this point I could have called it a day but my OCD kind of kicked in and I ordered myself a bunch of blank keys Stone Jacks to fill out the empty spaces on the patch panels totally unnecessary I know but I just had to do it also at this point the shorter DAC cables had arrived so I changed those out as well once again totally not necessary speaking of things that are not necessary there is one more thing I mean let's face it we all know adding RGB to anything adds 40 performance boost so I didn't want to save a few bucks to sacrifice that kind of performance gains overall I'm very happy with how this turned out now is this the final setup knowing me probably not but it's a setup that I'm generally very happy with anyways I hope you enjoyed watching this video as much as I enjoyed making it don't forget to subscribe and hit the like button for the YouTube algorithm as always stay safe and I'll see you again on the next one

Channel: TechTalk with Samir

Views: 30,801

Keywords: unifi, unifi dream machine SE, udm se, unifi dream machine pro, network revamp, home network revamp, network closet, home networking, ubiquiti unifi, unifi switch aggregation, network rack, rack mounting networking gear, synology, NAS, network attached storage, homelab, proxmox, patch panel, network switch, nvr, lorex nvr, fast wifi, fast network, 10 gig networking, 10gbe, synology 1618+, rgb lighting, home lab, home server

Id: UaWRRWWvJlU

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2023