Huge Network Upgrade for My Homelab

so you're thinking about upgrading your network and you want something that's going to last this year and throughout 2021 you'd like lots of ports and lots with poe and then maybe a couple of 10 gig ports with sfp plus and then maybe you want to put that behind a secure gateway and possibly get an nvr with it too let's see if we can get this and more in my network upgrade hey welcome back so i'm techno tim and today we're going to talk about my home lab network upgrade as a quick reminder i stream every tuesday thursday and saturday so if you want to continue the conversation about network upgrades there we can so let's talk about my recent network upgrade so if you saw my homeland tour video you saw my network you saw how my network is set up as well as the infrastructure in place and in that video you saw the backbone to my network which was an sg 218 port gigabit switch and that switch has served me well for about six years and while the switch works great i wasn't using a lot of the management features also it doesn't have poe poe is something that i use for my access points for my cameras and i'd like to plug some raspberry pi's in at some point currently i have a poe switch that's up linked to this switch that delivers power to all of my cameras also i have some unify access points here too but i use the poe injectors and i'd like to get rid of all of that so my first big upgrade was a switch and what did i decide to upgrade it to i decided to pick up the unify switch pro 24 port poe gen 2 switch and yes it's the one that wendell from level one text was just talking about he was explaining the differences in poe which i'll probably have to review but this switch has 24 ports and they're all poe eight of them are poe plus plus ports and 16 of them are poe plus ports and these are different standards but it does give me a lot of flexibility with the things i want to plug into it in the future the other nice thing about this switch is it has two 10 gig sfp plus ports this gives me some 10 gig capabilities and while i haven't decided if i'm gonna use them as an uplink or connect two machines at 10 gig it's nice to know that it's there when i need it the other plus for me and this is a given is that i can manage it with the unify network controller it will be nice to manage my switch the same way that i manage my access points so i no longer have multiple uis to configure multiple systems which is where i was before this upgrade so why did i go with the switch over another one well i needed more than 16 ports so any 16 port switch was off the table next i needed at least seven poe ports to get rid of some of the poe switches that were hanging off my main switch and this will power cameras access points and possibly a raspberry pi and since all ports are powered by some flavor of poe i no longer need to worry about which cables routed where and where it's terminated to and if i run out of pue ports i can just get a non-poe switch in the future and although this was a little more expensive than their other switches what finally tipped the scales was the two sfp plus ports which gives me some flexibility i can uplink it to another switch or i could run one to my truna server into my workstation so to sum it all up i ended up getting this switch because it could be managed by the unifi controller it has 24 ports which all have some flavor of poe and it has two sfp plus ports and if you add up all those features and consider i'm getting all of that in one u i thought this was a pretty decent value so moving on to what will protect my network what will be the security gateway for all of my hardware and services you guessed it the unifi dream machine pro as you know i've been on a journey to find a great network firewall and for roughly the last 10 years i've been swapping out network firewalls most of the time i've been virtualizing that with a virtual appliance and i've tried everything from ddwrt to ipcob to smooth wall to untangle to open sense to pf sense and now i'm on xg firewall by sophos and while all of these have worked great i've always wanted tighter integration not only with the services running on the box but with the rest of my network and this is where i felt that the udm pro could help out so this is the unifi dream machine pro and you already know the stats i picked this up because it's rack mounted it has eight gigabit ports albeit not poe it also supports ips and ids for security scanning and detection it supports a 1 and a 10 gig wan connection the 10 gig is an sfp plus port and i'd love to be able to use this as an uplink but i don't think you can there's also a hard drive slot for video surveillance and nvr and it has the cloud key built in giving me access to my unifi network from anywhere and so with these two things in hand along with a few other things you'll see here later on let's go upgrade my network and so here's my rack in its current state and as everyone knows red rgb gives you better performance and blue rgb gives you better cooling which i thought was appropriate for my rack maybe next time we can work on some green rgb to get better efficiency and save some power but anyway here's my switch in its current state as you can see i have a patch panel or a punch down block that terminates all of the cable from my house to this panel and from there that connects to my cisco switch and for my switch i have a poe switch hanging off of that now i need to move all of these cables over to my new rack this is where i'm going to get some help from a new piece of hardware this is the detroit packing company 24 port patch panel this panel is almost perfect for what i'm going to use it for it has rj45 keystones pre-installed that allow me to patch the ethernet in from the back to the front this was one of the biggest reasons i went with this patch panel because i won't need to cut terminate and punch down 24 cables in the back this gives me a ton of flexibility but at the cost of buying a few more ethernet cables but when's the last time you said to yourself i have too many ethernet cables also the nice thing about this is like all keystones they can be swapped out for things like dac fiber or even hdmi if you want it was also pretty simple to install you just line it up screw it in and then connect your ground wire now coming back to why i said this was almost perfect is because i do wish that they made a happy or a 0.5 u version now i know that would get rid of the labels but that would allow me to install two in my rack and only take up a total of 1u which would help me clean up the cables in the front but we'll get to that next we'll install the unify switch pro the 24 poe one i chose to install this directly underneath so that i could wire up everything nicely this is a pretty standard install you just connect and screw in the ears install the cage nuts then screw in the unifi switch pro easy peasy next we'll install the unifi dream machine pro i chose to install this directly beneath my switch again so i could wire up everything nicely and so i can attach the sfp plus dac cable with a short run now if i would have had a half view patch panel i would have installed it here and bumped everything down a half but it is what it is so now we just need to wire up all of our new ports this is my favorite part i went with these slim cat6 ethernet cables that i think turned out nicely i bought both 6 and 12 inch cables so i could connect all the ports to my switch this is where i wish i had another half view patch panel i could have put a patch panel above and below my switch so then i could have used all 6 inch cat6 and made it look nice and have some extras for the things i mentioned before like dac fiber or even hdmi then i connected the dac to the sfp plus port on the udm pro to the switch pro this gives me a 10 gig uplink also want to be sure that these are clicked in i usually give them a little tug at the end just to make sure so for now i'm going to use it as an uplink but i may change this in the future well now we'll power everything on and make sure it's working so far so good next i bought some more cat6 to run from my new patch panel to my old patch panel that's mounted on the wall this was the cleanest way that i could think of to get my network from a new panel to my old one this also saved a lot of frustration if i had to cut and terminate all the cables myself so once i got most of those ran i still needed to connect my servers and my devices this again is where i wanted to save some time and frustration while keeping my network flexible i decided to pick up some additional keystones so that i could extend the cables from my servers and devices to my new patch panel pro tip it's much cheaper to buy keystones than to buy ethernet cable extenders yes they aren't as pretty as the extenders you see out there but they accomplish the same thing so those worked out pretty nice i ended up using a handful of them to extend some cables after connecting everything i decided to use some velcro and bind it all up to my old patch panel the velcro really helped clean up some of the mess oh yeah and don't forget to peel off the lcd protector so you can see this awesome mini touch screen underneath there's a touch display that's kind of nice i've already used it a few times to reboot the device check my ips and also check the temperature and although it's nice to have it's definitely not critical but i think the best use for this screen is actually augmented reality yes augmented reality or ar once you have the unifi app up and running you can actually scan a barcode on this device that barcode will launch an augmented reality experience and to be honest it's one of the best implementations of augmented reality i've ever seen most implementations like the one in the target app or the amazon app you can see what a piece of furniture looks like inside your home and while that is kind of fun and kind of useful i don't think it's as useful as the ar built into the unify app after scanning the code you can see all of the devices that are attached to those ports this is super helpful for tracing diagnosing or even knowing which plug to unplug or not unplug and it helps saving me from going to the ui to figure this out or break out my trusty excel spreadsheet but all in all not critical but super handy so now that we've connected all that the only thing left to do is to turn it on and configure it once turning it on and going to the ip address of the udm pro you'll be greeted with a welcome screen and these devices like it or not are cloud connected so you'll need to sign in with an existing ui account or create one it will ask a few questions then run a speed test then set up your device then update it once in you can continue configuring the rest of your device and if you have an existing network controller already set up it's as easy as exporting that from the existing device and importing it into your new device in my case i had the unified controller running in docker and kubernetes but i did run into one gotcha doing this is that the network controller inside of the udm pro is running version five and the version i was running in docker and kubernetes was version six if you try to import this you'll get an error about trying to import a newer version into an older version and i couldn't find a way to update it within the ui so what i ended up doing was ssh into my udm pro then copying the url for the newer network controller using wget to download it then installing it using dpkg after doing that the network controller was updated to the latest version then it can successfully import my existing version then you should have access to all your existing devices and then you can adopt your new devices and now i have a lot more visibility and observability across my entire network so i'm super happy with this upgrade and so i'd like to know what kind of network upgrades you're gonna make would you have made some of the choices that i made or done something totally different would you have chosen a different rgb color if so let me know in the comments section below and while you're down there don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and consider subscribing if you haven't already and if you have more questions you can always join my live stream i stream every tuesday thursday and saturday so if you have a question about this video or any of my other videos hop in my stream and i'd love to have you so thanks so much for watching and until next time stream on my friends that kind of stinks because because now if i don't have an apu now i got to use up one of these pci express slots um and i've noticed in most 1u cases um yeah does anyone have windows number yeah tell them to call me first tell them who i am and then tell them again who i am and then yeah tell him to call me um because he would be like what anyways um and so

Channel: Techno Tim

Views: 90,282

Rating: 4.9144969 out of 5

Keywords: techno tim, unifi, ubnt, ubiquiti, dream machine pro, udm, udm pro, UniFi Switch 24 PoE, gen 2, poe, PoE+, PoE++, USW-24-POE, UniFi Switch PoE+ 24, UniFi Switch 24 250W, UniFi Switch PRO 24 PoE, touchscreen, ar, augmented reality, UniFi Network Controller, upgrade, network, 2020, 2021, SmartPower, switch, homelab, home lab, dac, patch panel, detroit packing, cat6, cat6a, cable management, keystone, huge network upgrade, vlan, 802.3at, 802.3bt, Layer 3, protect, access, talk, technotim, replace, no hat

Id: sWvEiVM9Yfw

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/bossman118242]

is the udm pro being discontinued or something? seen a few comments about it