Home Network Server Rack Tour Pt.2 (Full Breakdown)

hey fellow nerds welcome back this is Beth oh I apologize for the long delay on uploading the second part of my initial video which I uploaded a few months back regarding my server my home data network here I know in YouTube's standards that seems to be like an eternity without getting into all the details I recently had a newborn so really to get a chance to follow up with that soon thereafter a lot of you have already reached out and inquired and commented I'm going to know all the juicy details regarding the equipment how my home network here set up the different components within the setup here but we aren't here I am live from the bowels of my basement where this actually server rack is located that I happen to luck out in getting this a few years back I got a great deal on a sale that I found actually locally through an office that was liquidating and they found them actually I believe from Craigslist and the nice thing about it is you actually have it was Caesar liquidating they were getting rid of a lot of their their own data network equipment and amongst the amongst them were these racks in fact they had two of these on sale and I picked up a lifetime of a deal with this I end up paying about 120 dollars of memories certainly right certainly not more than 150 bucks and so I pretty passed it up it was such a good deal it is a little loud in this room obviously because I am burying some equipment that's on 24/7 specifically my servers I know I've received a lot of questions and inquiries and I to my surprise I you know when I initially up more this I over video a few months back it was really meant for just a couple of my colleagues to kind of show him the progress that I've been making over the years making not only the changes to my server rack here but really kind of the the setup that I've been really tackling up for it's been out actually two years two and a half years now where when I moved into this home one of the objectives and really a goal of mine was to consolidate all my data feeds all my runs including my audio distribution system my video components and really kind of containing it into a single location a single a hub if you made a cover or as my some of my colleagues I've referred to as a co essential kind of a central office location here and I happen to look out in that the room that I'm actually in now is adjacent to a utilities room and we're also my wife is not really bothered by it considering that it's next to the laundry unit and the utilities room so it's not you know so nice or that's stuck up in the middle of living room somewhere it's really out of the way all the wiring that you see up here is off cat6 cabling there's a mixture of some rg6 so let me go ahead and Pam a camera out this way the structured media panel that you're looking over here just adjacent to the rack is where all my main feeds come in related to video so for example I got some Direct TV lines here and all these feeds are going right back up to the rooms are the the bedrooms the main living areas you know there was this was a renovation project so I did knock out a lot of walls and remove drywall upstairs to essentially do all these lines I did this installation all by myself it was a project that took me roughly almost a full year in terms of you know on and off time of course but it took me almost a full year to complete all the runs to every single room in this in this house including the basement the main living floor and the 30 the upper level which consists of the bedrooms and even the bathrooms are set up so each single room in this house is completely wired up with cat6 cabling rg6 there's also even in some cases very some-some fiber here that I use some low voltage wiring for power and but predominantly the cabling here is all cat6 now when we catch six because they were relatively cheap cat six and at 6 million x7 we're relatively expensive at the time and you know for my applications for my purposes my needs I really didn't need cat 7 so I decided just go with cat 6 has enough bandwidth capabilities to support the gigabit network that I am running here the way I'm gonna tentacle is I'm going to start from the top and kind of work my way down and explain the different components that are installed in this rack now you'll see that I have a 24-point patch panel I have a switch and a router which is a micro tick brand explain this here in a minute right below that I also have an additional 24 port patch panel below that I have a Gigabit Ethernet switch by neck here and then the last patch panel right below that is an actual 12 port so I have a total of 48 ports up top and then an additional 12 and just below that I have a gateway from ATT u-verse that I used to run an IP TV but that's no longer the case I strictly use it now for the pots right next to that is another gigabit switch actually it's a another Netgear box I'm using this solely for testing purposes and redundancy and also just I have independent pcs upstairs and machines that I'm running that if I ever need to test anything internally troubleshooting anything I can always log in here so that's really what the purpose behind it below that you'll probably recognize that's a cable modem that's actually a Motorola surfboard believe it's DSP 60 141 my ISP currently as Comcast and I am earning believe the extreme package which getting anywhere between 75 to 95 megabits of our scuse me megabyte download speeds and my upload on that is anywhere between 10 and 12 which kind of sucks really that's kind of the bottleneck of this entire set up the irony is you know looks nice here looks all cool but unfortunately the bottleneck right now is my upload which really is what I like to use it for a lot consuming I do a lot of land ITP sessions and I also stream a media server so this tends to be the bottleneck however once gigabit is available in my neighborhood I'm planning to upgrade to that package now next this modem you'll see well another switch however this is a POS which let me go ahead and now pan down my camera here now the purpose of this POS which is to independently power my indoor surveillance I have for IP P a week cameras security cameras installed inside my home including a baby monitor that that requires P a weed power rather than running independent power sources and along with another ethernet the nice thing about having a Pee Wee IP camera is it eliminates you know the hassle of extra wiring and why not it really simplifies that solution here so this is an 8 port goe switch currently I have a set up so that for our Mikey cameras another one is a it's an open slot that I'm currently installing another IP camera indoor camera for my garage and then the last port that I'm using here is for a control for touch screens that also uses a peewee to power it on and provide data connection to it so that's how I have these are configured and the reason I have them in purple is to identify that any purple runs here are my surveillance connections as you can see the four Pig pee-wee's connections hook up to the second 24 port patch panel right up top here utilizing six of those now the middle section here you'll see there are white cat 6 cables now these are what I call kind of my redundant and my backup cat 6 lines each single room in this house throughout the home has redundancy so that in the event of any failure even during my runs when I was feeding all the lines further individual rooms the event that one of the cables got spliced or damaged I wanted to make sure that I have simpler redundancy so these are also running to and an unmanaged switch which is that Netgear to 24-port switch it's a gigabit switch now these are also designed so that the only access in internally at my home network there is no some of these do access the outside world however they're really meant for the backup but also any land worked and running for virtual machines etc which is really meant for internal usage along with the back of as I've indicated the the first six ports you'll see that these are black cat 6 cables now this is actually running they go to individual music keypads that are in my bedrooms my living space excuse me my kitchen and also my office area really like this setup it's a few years old now but it's actually a carryover from my previous house and this is how I run my audio distribution throughout the home I have incident speakers and virtually all the bedrooms including my main living area my office and the nice thing about this system is that it uses Ethernet as a means to send the communications the audio to these individual keypads that I'll be showing here and each keypad can control individual up to poor audio Reese up to four audio sources in this case four analog sources or digital sources and they're independently controlled of each other so for example if my wife wanted to kind of chill out and you know read a book or something and have some music playing in the background in one room I could be in my office jamming to some heavy metal or something and have my own source of music without bothering her so we each have our own source of music independent of each other and the nice thing about this solution and really one of my favorite things is that I can control everything from that Keith everything for my channel stores my audio source my volume adjustments I can even do bluetooth I can add an external source to it from from my wall using one of these fancy plugs that I got up here in one of these examples so that's my music distribution system that is the sole purpose of his box and it's all done via ethernet and which is why I have it here then you really touch upon on the switch here is this is a switch and a router it's a kind of a two-in-one device but it's an enterprise-grade switch that I really really like a lot it's it's made by a company called mikrotik I believe they're Taiwanese or maybe in South Korean I've learned about them over the last few years they're really you know are comparable if not just equivalent to the Cisco Enterprise routers or even the net gear equipment they're very reliable from what I understand I've had this one for a couple years now and really the reason I end up going with this switch and it's also a router is for the label three management this thing is fully customizable I have dedicated you know some of these sports for VLAN I can go in and customize individual ports you know I can have some customized different levels a throughput I have also had some firewall setup it's fully manageable which is really the important and key thing about it for security features and another nice little perk that you that I have that really has you can see up here has a little built-in display and really what this does it serves a couple purposes it actually I can individually go to each single port any of these 24 ports and look at its current utilization I can look at my throughput levels it gives me a nice view high-level view of my packets my data the bandwidth that I'm allocating like an individually search by different Ethernet ports here I can fully look at IP addresses making sure I got the correct state instead of logging into the PC and kind of going in there and getting to the menu this this is more or less a nice way to get a quick look into your into my mikrotik router and switch I mentioned before the all the red cat6 cables here are running to my main living area my office and along with some bedrooms upstairs I did talk a little bit about the the blue cat 6 cables you see here these are actually configured in a VLAN or some firewall these are designated so that only I can access these ports internally there's no access to the outside world and again another one of the nice features of this having a managed switch is that I am able to designate and customize support as I see fit now coming back here you'll notice there's two cat 6 cables here the first one I would obviously be this is coming in from the cable modem below it that's my main ISP so this is where I gave my DC HD and above that is actually acting as an access point for my wireless connections upstairs I'm actually using a consumer product hacked with W or scuse me the dd-wrt open source software and then old or not old but relatively new Asus router that I got configured as an access point so this feed here this cat 6 actually is connected to a closet and conveniently located in the central part of the home and so I do have some additional cat 6 cables running to that and that's where I had the access point so and I have a guest Network also configured within this so that if any my guest command I'm running independent 2g and 5g Wi-Fi connections and those access points are coming in from the this pipeline here which is my port to I also have the ability to do a attend gigabit connection but I currently do not have that set up the switch does allow me to do that it has an SF p1 connection here which currently is not utilized but I do have that ability for some future expansions and something that I might keep in mind for one of my servers that I'm currently working on so let's go back down and I'll talk about the the remaining components left in the rack here so coming off my direct to the equipment here this is the genie system many of you may be familiar with Roger activity works nowadays I like the previous generation in previous models DirecTV Genie now is kind of a server client tech system where the genie DVR in this case exit the server and there's many clients that are connected to the actual TV of themselves and those little mini box clients are connected back to this DVR to the GE system right below it you'll see it's a it's actually about two or three generations Hardware directv hardware that's actually an over-the-air tuner it's an off air tuner that came in the previous generation before the new Genie model came out now the reason I decided to keep this is it is a phenomenal over-the-air tuner and it's it's it's so purpose is to capture and really lock in all the over-the-air channels if you give for free and instead of using the DirecTV fee that they provide for your local HD channels i instead resort to this so for example if I'm watching channel 32 local feed it would be 30 2-1 on the over-the-air tuner and I actually do find that there's a picture quality difference and it attributed a lot of oftentimes distributed because of the compression that's you know a runs to the satellite versus not compression going directly to the tuner and again that's all tied back in into my roof antenna that's in the patch pan over here in the cabinet and then that main feed gets distributed back out and then one of those lines runs right back into this OTA tuner and I also have it installed here for ease of troubleshooting in the event that I have any satellite feed issues or you know I come across any of the prawns with the genie connections all my lines are running through here one central location one stop shop so really simplifies my troubleshooting in the event that you know I have some kind of signal loss and I also have an external monitor attached to this box so that I can actually view the TV so I do have an HDMI out that's running to both the main feed and I also have component as a backup to look at the real live streams so I can I don't necessarily have to run up and down the stairs or to the different rooms or these clients are located at I can simply look at them from down here and I even worry about it and all this is all tied into an RF module and ir-2 an IR blaster - an RF my blaster that's all controlled through the control for system and the nice thing about this control for solution is that everything gets tied in here I have that seven inch touchscreen but they're located in my kitchen wall that enables me to go ahead and control all my different sources my lighting my music my audio sources my video sources I can even you know shut my lights off I can go ahead and control my temperature via the nest thermostat that I have it also enables me to look into my surveillance systems so it really automates all that for me and really the whole purpose of that this whole box although it's not necessarily a consumer level automation system it's more in the professional line of things but this particular model is kind of an entry level and I would highly suggest this for anybody interested in any kind of professional home automation them it's a phenomenal little box I've always enjoyed control for products or reasonably priced considering what they're capable of doing I find to be a great solution for anyone interested in looking into home automation and again all this is every component here whether it's my audio-video sources it's all somehow tied back into this and I have full control on that seven inch touchscreen that I have up against my kitchen wall right above it is the actual outdoor surveillance DVR system that I have by impressed this is a one terabyte DVR and this is strictly for my outdoor surveillance system that I have I'm running a four channel setup currently on 1080p cameras their outdoor ceiling cameras the weatherproof and this machine with the one terabyte I can roughly get about maybe three weeks give or take worth of archived footage that I can always trace back and log into and get in there and you know really I've every you know and event anything happens I can always go back and check my outdoor surveillance footage I do have the option of hooking up a keyboard here and you can see I even have a mouse that enables me to get into the menu system and configure it customize it as I please through motion time storage etc so it's a very reliable rock-solid surveillance system I had its another system I really like enjoy a lot the GUI is really clean simple impress is also the same cameras that I'm using for my let me go ahead and pan up here for those IP peewee cameras they're also 1080p streams so I can access all these remotely internally you know through my oh I have independent VLANs that I have set up these are two of the four sources that I'm currently using right now so that I can go ahead and control in those independent keypads that I was referring to earlier so this is a tuner this is strictly an HD tuners with AM and FM it's a sight solid little box and again I wanted to contain it here as well and I also have IR blasters that convert it to RF via the this ir 2 RF blaster adapter this is actually made by universal remote that also uses an essentially ties in all my audio/video equipment I get all the IR s and it ties them back into here and that converts it to RF and there's an rs-232 connection back to the control force system and essentially I can control anything whether it's through independently through the control for solution or through those independent key pads that are tied into the music of server so that's what these are these are strictly for audio and these are really designated for the music distribution system so right below that is kind of where I beginning a lot of the questions and really kind of where most of the conversation has been engaged and people are wondering what in the world am i running here so you'll see these are 224 Bay Supermicro chassis server units now this top one here I currently I have it configured with FreeNAS operating system if anyone's not familiar with FreeNAS it's an open source software that essentially is for enterprise or really any Soho's kind of solution it's free it's a wonderful community and great community for supporting the system there's always upgrades it's like I personally think it's probably the best operating system out there available today for any kind of mass solution or storage or backup or security anybody familiar with free nationals that they use the ZFS format which is very reliable very rock-solid and I am currently using 24 terabyte on this particular server here now this one these two are actually this is the active one you probably see some lights right now flashing this is actually my main media server and I use plex to not only manage all my media but also control its streaming locally or remotely most a big fan of Kodi another popular open source software is kind of a multi media management software between your server and your clients so this is a dedicated media server this is all this does and again I currently am running 24 terabyte which I know it sounds excessive but you know nowadays with 4k video home movies storage backup music photos archival 24 terabytes is it goes pretty quick you'd be surprised and also although I'm only using 24 terabytes right now probably have about 18 maybe 16 oh that is currently used up I'm currently expanding this last section here and then the one right below it is kind of the the work-in-progress server it's currently off right now but this is going to be acting as a backup to a lot of my personal information here and my multimedia but it's also my own cloud and I'm also going to be running freenas on this as well and I mention you can install about 48 terabyte so this is going to encompass a combination of it's going to serve as both a backup to this guy here but also my own personal cloud and some archival and I'm actually running a test server right now which is this little guy here which is an X it's an HP ProLiant it's a dl360 GS it's a single chassis into 1u unit server chassis and it's although it's a couple years old now maybe a few years old I picked up a Craigslist again that I was selling a few of these and I'm really where I'm running this board is - it's a virtual machine I'm independently testing several os is right now currently half fedora 23 I might run a boon to on it so I kind of Linux OS this stuff fills up pretty quickly and storage is so cheap nowadays you know I am running an enterprise level hard drives here these are all 10000 rpm 20 1/2 inch I believe there's a it's a combination of Barracuda I got some HP drives in here some Seagate so I like to kind of mix it a net where you don't have different batches but up here I'm actually running four SSDs at 160 gigabyte these are SanDisk I for SSDs these are standard two and a half inch disk hard drives so right now again this is strictly for purpose of just testing and just kind of running different software and operating systems it's just more like a test fate here so it kind of gives me the luxury of playing around with different systems and really kind of learning to along the way so I'm going to pan down here the last portion of the system here and the components and that is the power protection the conditioner and the UPS systems you'll notice I have a pen MX it's an M 5400 it's an actual power conditioner and it's although it's made for home theater applications from above I have several audio and video hardware components and those are actually being fed through here it serves multiple purposes it cleans up any power any dirty lines and it really conditions make sure that we got clean signal and voltage is stabilized so you'll see here it shows my amperage my bolts along with the different banks that I have activated on and then that's all this is fed and this is strictly for my audio/video component and in fact I think I might have my modem in here and a couple other of the networking devices so right below that is what I would consider one of the most important pieces of hardware for any home network solution and that is UPS systems I think UPS systems are often overlooked and you know I often have friends that always losing power or run into some voltage spikes and God knows what else perhaps they never had any backup or they do have a nice little home set up but then they always fail to have some kind of protection behind all that equipment and some kind of backup power in the event of an outage lightning strikes etc so you know I've always said that your your equipment and your your home network is only as good as your UPS system and your backup solution that you have in place in my case although these are not rack mounted I am running three independent UPS systems with this first one here this these are these both here are CyberPower this one I believe is a 1500 AVR solution this one's a thousand this one is actually exclusively tied into those two big beast servers the super micro chassis the the three servers up top I'm actually already had in order three more so that each server will have its own independent power right now I can get about 50 minutes worth of backup or power down in the event of an outage this middle one it's a little older cyber power backup unit but it's pretty solid I just got a new battery in it so it works like a champ now this one is tied in to more of the smaller network equipment such as the cable modem the router the switch and the rest of the equipment that I have up there for networking and this little one up here is actually a battery backup unit that came in with the ATT u-verse solution so I'm still using it for my pots line and something else I got forget off top of my head but that's really meant for that so that at least if I ever need an emergency for my landlines I always have a backup for the phone I can always dial nine-one-one out so that really concludes the the bottom part of the rack as you can see from the background there there's still some cable management and some cleanup that I still have to you know finish up but for the most part I wanted to kind of give everybody a little bit more details of what I'm running the equipment that I have here so let me go ahead and pan up kind of give you a the low POV shot here of my setup one thing I forgot to mention is when I had this when I was doing these renovations I asked my electrician to give me a three independent 20 amp outlets specifically for this room so I had a 200 amp service actually dropped in from a hundred the former 100 amp servers that I had and ahead of that upgraded to a 200 amp service so right now I'm actually running three dedicated 20 amp outlets here specifically for the servers a lot of this equipment runs 24/7 so it does require a lot of power but I am in the process of also upgrading some of the power supplies from these servers is there a little bit loud but they're not as efficient as I like them to be they do have redundant power supplies as well so that's another reason why it's kind of loud in here but that that's a future upgrade in the meantime the nice thing about being in this room it's it's kind of tucked in away from the rest of the house so you really can't hear much unless you're really down in this room and that's kind of one of the nice things the wife really allowed me to kind of have my little playroom here gives me the chance to kind of play around with my network - upgrades without really bothering so everything is centrally located all the feeds come into one place one drop stop so there it is folks if you guys have any other questions comments anything else you guys would like me to dive into any more details I welcome the suggestions or comments feedback I really appreciate it again thank you again for tuning in I'll be making more of these videos soon as I continue to upgrade and make modifications and changes in my network and amongst other things with my automation and do constant upgrades so please please be tuned if you like my channel albeit I have just two three videos up here but hopefully this is the beginning of something good and I can continue this path and nerds alike and collaborate here so appreciate everybody thank you so much for your time and we'll see you guys soon thank you

Channel: Tech-O Tuesday

Views: 282,359

Keywords: home network, home server, gigabit, network tour, media, multimedia, data center, nas, server rack, freenas, mikrotik, netgear, cat6, ethernet, network installation, supermicro, home automation, control 4, automation, zwave, gigabit ethernet, rg6, plex server, plex, kodi, plex media, survelliance, poe, poe switch, poe ip cameras, amcrest, outdoor security, security cameras, ip camera, POE, ip poe camera, plex media server, music, home security, cisco, structured media panel, server room

Id: yUb5CX16XaU

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 23 2016