My 10 Gigabit Home: How I Connected It All

hey i'm dave welcome to my shop today in dave's garage we're going to talk about 10 gigabit home networking and what you need to know in order to make it all work now when i say 10 gigabit home networking it's true this home is just like any other in most every regard except perhaps physical dimension complexity and data demands as you can see it's a large place well over ten thousand square feet spread across four buildings and three stories with something like 30 rooms there are about 50 network drops and at any given time about 100 clients are active on the network there's a server closet three main equipment racks and about a half dozen access panels and punch downs we go through about four terabytes of internet each month well that's a lot of youtube all of this conspires to make for some interesting and unique challenges and i thought you might be interested in seeing what goes into a home network of this size particularly when converting it all to 10 gigabit and ensuring great wi-fi coverage throughout now the easy thing to do would have been to write the big check hire a systems integrator fire in a bunch of enterprise equipment and call me when it's ready but that's not how i roll i'm a do-it-yourself kind of guy i love the process of researching and buying the hardware and setting it all up in general i like what i call prosumer equipment and most of this project is built around ubiquiti hardware the stuff you can buy on amazon without a management contract i spent a lot of years working on operating systems of microsoft from ms-dos to windows 95 windows nt and on through xp 2000 and 2003. so while i do know my 7 layer osi network model there are some big holes in my knowledge i'm the kind of guy who can write a rest api and socket code and wire and terminate my own lan but if you need to route a specific port or address to some specific subnet there better be a good faq or ui to guide me along because i am not a networking expert by any stretch that's actually good for you in this case because there was so much that i didn't know that i had to learn in order to do this project and that means those questions are still fresh in my mind like what's an sfv port what's an sfv plus port how do you connect one to the other where do good old rj45 ethernet cables fit into all this and how do i plug an ethernet cable into an sfp switch i'll explain where optical fiber fits in how to choose between one or the other in different scenarios and so on we'll talk about powering things over the network with poe and how to manage multiple access points with a single controller since i just did a complete overhaul of the entire network infrastructure short of pulling new cable it's all pretty fresh in my mind particularly the parts that i didn't know the answer to when i started this project and those are the ones that i think it's important to share it seems that every other video about tangent networking is focused on how cheap and easy it can be i mean hey you can just grab a microtech switch and a couple of direct attached copper cables two network cars and you're smoking along at the magical 10 gigabits couple hundred dollars you're done i'll show you how to set that up as well but it's really only handy when dealing with computers in the same room or at least with very short cable runs i'll explain these limitations later on so you're not bitten or surprised by them like i was before i get too deep into the how i should probably cover some of the why why do i even need 10 gig in my house well it all started with this youtube channel when i got to about 10 000 subscribers i decided to upgrade to an atmos ninja 5 external video recorder which would allow me to record the video in 4k hlg 3 prores 422 better yet i could record directly to an ssd rather than slow and expensive sd cards and that's all just a fancy way of saying that i upgraded my recording process to be higher quality and easier for me to edit but at the cost of much larger file sizes 30 minutes of a 4k multicam project could easily wind up being a terabyte that's not so bad in and of itself but i like to edit in different places i record here in the garage in an old trashcan mac pro but in the mornings i like to edit in final cut on my macbook with a cup of coffee on the sofa i have what i think is an ideal setup where a single 2 meter thunderbolt 3 cable brings me 100 watts of power gigabit internet and access to a docking station behind the sofa that contains a 4 terabyte time machine and a fast ssd it also now connects me to the 10 gigabit lan i simply sit down and plug in that one cable in the afternoons i like to edit in the oval office which is a setup very much like the sofa but that uses the dell 38 inch monitor as a central hub you plug that thunderbolt 3 cable in the same way here when you do you also gain the mouse keyboard and trackpad because so it becomes a great editing workstation the problem with all this was access to the final cut video projects a gigabit network just isn't fast enough and so i normally resorted to carrying around a thunderbolt 3 ssd that i would just plug in wherever i was working but given the investment everything else having to play sneaker net with ssd didn't make a lot of sense it also meant plugging the disk in and out all the time and sometimes merely bumping the cable the wrong way on a macbook will cause it to eject the disk to its credits final cut never once corrupted a project on me but it still gave me the willies and since the ssc didn't belong to any one machine it wasn't automatically backed up each night there were multiple ways that i could lose a lot of work for all those reasons and more i wanted to be able to store the projects on a central server all i needed now was a new nas capable of 10 gigabit new network cards for each client a 10 gigabit lan with 10 gigabit routers and switches uh but there was one big big problem this house is 14 years old and cat5 just won't cut it for long runs found in a house like this so discretion being the better part of valor i thought the right thing to do was to maybe go in the crawlspace and run new cable to my office the sofa and somehow pull it out to the shop with a central server closet included that would give me my three editing stations content with that compromise i started to explore the existing wiring and that's when i was in for a surprise but a pleasant one even at 14 years old this house was wired almost entirely with cat6 but what's the difference most existing wiring homes and the patch cables you've been buying until recently were cat5 or cat 5e as a bit of background in order to avoid noise you really want to avoid running any wires in parallel because they act like rabbit ears and pick up rf the secret to twisted pair ethernet wiring is that as the name implies each pair of wires is twisted one around the other and such that they never truly run in parallel then the four twisted pairs are grouped as a bigger bundle and you've got cat5 it can carry 100 megahertz signal and it's not actually rated for 10 gigabit at all but you might get away with it for short distances cat6 which is what i apparently have ups the thickness of the wire gauge slightly for lower resistance over long runs and it introduces a separator down the middle so that the four twisted pairs are then twisted around the central core further reducing any inducted noise rated at 250 megahertz you can run shorter distances like 20 meters of 10 gigabit but it's not actually rated for longer runs than that cat 6a which is what you need for 10 gigabit runs up to 100 meters adds metal foil shielding around each pair and brings it up to 500 megahertz category 7 adds a foil shield around the bundle as a whole and ups the rating to 600 megahertz category 8 which i've never seen in person is made from unicorn main and is rated at 2 000 megahertz and 40 gigabits for distances up to 30 meters while the house really should be cast 6a to run 10g to every room like i plan i figure if it's not mission critical the real answer is what it'll actually do so my very first test was to try the longest run from the server closet out to the shop two buildings away i estimate it as close to 100 meters which is technically too long for plural cat6 but i figured i'd try and see what i got and i got what i feared sometimes 2.5 g sometimes 5g but never 10g hey i'm future dave sent back in time by the editors in order to prevent the paradox wherein i talk about and refer to transceivers before explaining it anyway what they are so let me fix that by giving you a little brief rundown on transceivers we'll talk about them in much more detail later but just so you know what i'm talking about when i'm talking about range issues with them what a transceiver even is if you look at a microtech switch it has four sfp ports and then one rj45 port this is only a one gig port these are the 10 gig ports but you can't there's no uh they don't hook up right you can't just plug a network cable into the sfp ports they take some fancy schmancy steel looking cable like this with a big module on the end and the module does who knows what so what do you plug into it and how you adapt one or the other and the short answer is a transceiver and a transceiver allows you to plug the transceiver into the switch and then rj45 into it let's have a look at one now actually now this is the cpu out of a pdp-11 i just had that lane here and i kind of thought that was cool so where is my transceiver grab the fresh transceiver let's have a look you know when they come in their own box and it's all individually wrapped in a a steel tin with a little sliding tray can't be cheap right and they're not i think they're around 50 to 60 bucks a piece so what does that buy you an rj45 jack that's the important part so ah now you're cooking with gas now you can plug in our j45 hopefully a cat six a at least in and get some kind of connection the transceiver does the work of converting the electrical signals at the sfp port into something that can be sent over the ethernet cable just like you can also get them for fiber optics you can see there's two ports here one for send one for receive i can plug a fiber cable into that now i've got a fiber optic version so the transceiver is strictly the way of getting from the sfp port down to a physical layer like a cable and there's many ways to do it fiber direct attached copper rj45 ethernet those are the three that i've used they all work equivalent as long as you've got you know the same on both ends it's just they have different length limitations they have different restrictions and speeds and so on and we'll get more into that later now that you know what a transceiver is back to the show and if you do your homework it turns out that it doesn't matter how good the cable is because these transceivers will only push the signal for about 30 meters i had a full rj45 port on the one end but just a transceiver on the other it couldn't do 10g at that distance to solve that i ordered a ubiquity 10g aggregation switch that has 16 sfp plus ports and 4 native rj45 ports now we'll at least have a shot at a 10g connection but would it actually work over that cable at that distance tune in next time today's garage when we find out if i can muster a 10g connection all the way up to the shop from there we'll take a look at some of the infrastructure in this house the various racks punch downs cable drops cabinets and so on along the way i'll explain sfp and sfv plus transceivers what you need to know in order to decide what kind of components your host might need for an upgrade we'll look at best case and we'll look at horse case follow along in the next installment as i move on to test to upgrade the cabling add a dream machine pro poe switches 10g aggregation units and much much more we'll even install their protect video surveillance system alongside the existing system for good measure if your thumbs up icon is a boring old gray be sure to join the blue crew by clicking on it to turn it off let me turn the volume down on that yes so driveway monitor but i don't usually have a speaker next to me so i'm not used to that if your thumbs icon we're on a little startled if your thumbs up icon is a boring old gray be sure to join the blue crew by clicking on if this were nice shiny happy blue after all i'm not selling merchandise and i don't have patreons i'm just in it for the subs and likes so don't leave me hanging i'll see you in part two intruder alert indeed holy cow

Channel: Dave's Garage

Views: 76,215

Keywords: 10gbase-t or sfp+, sfp+, 10gbase-t, 10 gigabit ethernet, 10gigabit, 10 gigabit, 10g rj45, 10gbe switch, 10gbe, 10gb internet, 10gbe nic, 10g switch, nas server, homelab, network, synology, tech, 10gbe vs 1gbe, nas 10gbe, nas guide, synology 10gbe, mikrotik, unifi, us-16-xg, cheap 10gbe, networking basics, networking for dummies, ethernet adapter, network marketing, network engineer, synology nas setup, unifi dream machine, home network setup, Home network

Id: t0g0YGf9IWM

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/xeonrage]

I have so many questions about this guy and this house

why is he wearing cleaning gloves?

why does he have a giant desk but only uses the first few inches of it?

does he ever move his bottom jaw? :D

[u/gckless]

First 5 minutes was him talking about his house and why he wanted to run 10Gb, then he explained what speeds/distances each ethernet cable standard was rated for (the only possibly beneficial part of this video), then explained what a transceiver is, then said "tune in to my next video to see if it works.

This is the most basic level of knowledge about 10Gb, most people in this sub can skip this video.

[u/Robynb1]

I'm curious if he comes on here... seems like he would fit in nicely.

[u/ForSquirel]

just gonna book mark that..

I figure it'll be a good watch after I finally upgrade to Gigabit networking.