My Home Lab Is NOT What You Think It Is

as someone who makes a lot of videos covering hardware and home lab stuff you would probably think that I have a decent home lab setup but the truth is I don't really it's pretty messy but over the course of the next 2 days or so I'm going to turn this into this well I'm recording this beforehand so hopefully it looks good I don't know let's get [Music] started cleaning all of this up is going to be a bit tricky but what isn't tricky is building a website with the sponsor of today's video Squarespace Squarespace makes website building easy which is why I use it for my own website and online store their unique fluid engine simplifies the process of creating attractive websites even for someone like me who is terrible at web design additionally Squarespace made it incredibly convenient for me to set up an online store where I can list my physical and digital products and accept payment payments through credit cards PayPal and more if you want to start building the website or online store of your dreams visit squarespace.com Hardware Haven and use code Hardware Haven to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain okay so what all am I doing and why am I doing it well the why is probably pretty obvious at least in some cases my networking is a mess I have Cat 5 ran throughout my house and those wires all just come in through a hole in the wall into the multitude of random eight and four port switches I originally started off with a single eight Port switch and then needed Poe so I added a four port Poe switch and then needed more ports so I just have three of these sort of chained together so I want to clean up all of the networking stuff by a getting a single gigabit switch and then also cleaning up all of the wiring now to do that I'm going to be using this this is a I don't know the model number off the top of my head a T600 g28 PS or more importantly it's a 24 Port Poe gigabit switch from TPL link and it's a bit gross as you can tell this actually came from my previous job we used a lot of these for AV networking because they're pretty cheap and Fairly reliable but this one potentially started to have some issues it was unclear if it actually was the switch or not but we were already upgrading to some newer switches anyway and decided to just play it safe and retire this one so it's pretty dusty a bit gross but I'm going to try cleaning it up doing a factory reset just giving some new life to it and letting it replace those 3 GB switches that are in my network closet and you might be asking well this is a rack mount switch where is it going to go and that's where this comes in see I'm not one of those cool YouTube home labers that has a whole rack with a whole bunch of servers and drives and all that cool stuff but I happen to have this rack here and some some other random pieces from when I did more audio stuff and I figure I could turn this into a small little Network rack it's a bit unideal since it's meant to be sitting on a desk so it actually angles backwards a bit but it should fit on that shelf in my network closet and I may be able to put some legs on the back to sort of straighten it out a bit now to clean up all that mess of CAT 5 cables coming in the wall all I got oh God I got this a cable matters 24 Port cat 6 Keystone patch panel and so this will let me punch in all of those cables and have them nicely labeled and in this little rack so that I can run patch cables to my switch or wherever those connections need to go hopefully cleaning it up quite a bit and getting rid of the big mess of cables I also picked up this little cable grommet so for any cables that aren't going to be punched into the patch panel that can just cleanly run through here I also have at least one 10 GB switch here but that's going to be used in a follow-up video so make sure you're and get subscribed or whatever the other two things you probably saw are my Mac Mini and my 2base analogy Nas my analy Nas handles my security cameras and some simple storage for family stuff and my Mac Mini is what runs all of my services currently I'm probably going to be upgrading that two based anology in the second video so stay tuned but for today I do want to replace that Mac Mini because while the 2012 Mac Mini has been great for me it's my original Home Server I first set up and it honestly works great it handles all of our services we use at home like Plex and home assistant but I like to move everything to something where I have a bit more flexibility because I'd like to be able to spin up virtual machines or containers and test things out whenever I need to and the Mac Mini wasn't quite cutting it so that's where this comes in and you might recognize this this is the gecom mini it 12 I covered this in a video a while back where I talked about using the p and E cores on the Alder Lake CPU in here for virtualization and how you could potentially manipulate those to get better performance but I'm going to be turning this into my main home Surfer I'm going to set up proxmox so that I can spin up virtual machines and containers to make it a lot easier for me to test things out which I haven't really been able to do a lot of recently now alongside this I'm actually going to be running this tiny pilot KVM I don't know why I'm holding like that this tiny pilot KVM and this was actually sent over to me a while back and I had some ideas for how I was going to use it and it just didn't work out so it's just been sitting in my garage for a while and so I'm finally going to put this thing to use so I'm going to have this hooked up with the mini it2 sitting in the rack that way if there's ever any issues with this server I have a KVM that I can remote into and have complete access to this machine so that'll be pretty sick the plan right now is that those will both be just sitting on this shelf alongside my proxmox PF s box it's OB seed Odyssey running proxmox with pfSense and then running containers for all of my networking stuff like wire guard and pie hole those will all be along this bottom shelf then with the switches grommet patch panel and everything above it and in that follow-up video I'm probably going to be adding in a 10 gig switch here so yeah stay tuned I made sure to do backups of my whole router firewall setup earlier today and I think now I'm going to get started with labeling everything because a lot of the cables I don't necessarily know where they go and I'm going to need to make sure I know what cable it is before I punch it into the patch panel so let's go ahead and get started with that so for all things labeling I'm going to be using this which is quite honestly the best purchase I've made since running this channel this is the Brady m210 and this labeler is awesome one of my favorite things about it is that it can use nylon labels which wrap around cables and don't peel off like cheaper vinyl labels do so this thing's great I'm about to get started hunting down all of the cable runs in my house fortunately when I first got the house I traced them down and just did some like dots or lines on the cables to identify which cables went to which room so for most of them it should be pretty easy I added in a few more lines after we built the house and those I don't think are labeled but yeah the rest should be so hopefully it won't be too difficult hopefully it won't be too difficult so I don't necessarily trust all of my labeling as I'm looking at these so to go double check all of the Cat 5 Jack around the house I'm going to use a trusty old zma board with a Poe adapter that way I can just plug it into a Poe switch and if it kicks on like I can see it light up and I can tell which Jack is which I'm realizing now that a lot of the tools I used to use at my job I forgot that I don't own those they belonged to my work so I don't have my awesome little cat 5y testers to go hunt down lines it's kind of a bummer but yeah let's go do it this way [Music] [Music] I got all of the cat 5e lines labeled and also labeled the ports on my PF sense box it was about lunchtime at this point and rather than risking my wife coming home to no internet I decided to skip working on the patch panel and move over to the peelink switch it was pretty dusty so I took it apart and then gave it the hardware Haven treatment on my back [Music] porch I also did my best to clean out the ports and tried using a haird dryer to remove this label as I've been told to do that in some comments however that just turned the label into sort of a goo so I just stuck with some good old isopropyl alcohol and elbow grease while I already had my tools out I opened up the mini it12 to add some storage I don't need much for this machine so I added in a 1 TB 2 and 1/2 in SSD also removed the Wi-Fi card and dropped in this Coral TPU because I might try to set up a virtual machine running frigate for some AI recognition at some point I also dropped in a 256 GB nvme SSD as a boot drive this system originally came with two 8 GB sticks of ddr4 but I decided for running some virtual machines I'd want to have a bit more so I went with two 16 GB sticks for a total of 32 I plugged in the TP Link switch to get it configured and boy where the Fan's loud nothing to knock to a fan swap can't solve though after a quick factory reset I plugged the switch directly into my desktop made sure I was in the same subnet and then loed lged into the dashboard at 192.168.0.1 and from there I was able to configure the switch as needed also installed procm as I normally would on the mini it2 that way it would be ready to go whenever I dropped it into the rack it was getting pretty late so I decided to just call it a day all right so it's day two it's 7 in the morning and I think I'm going to go ahead and start trying to get all of these punched into the patch panel so I'm going to turn all of this stuff off and I think I'm going to try to move the firewall and just this one switch over off to the side so I can try to at least keep our internet and access points up so I have Wi-Fi throughout the day and then I'm going to start terminating all of these to our patch panel and then try to get the Rack in here so I got all the big stuff out over here I went ahead and turned my router back on here oh I need to plug in one more patch cable okay so I at least have that and my two access points loed up so I have Wi-Fi I think I'm actually going to hook that Mac Mini back up really quick as well just so I have home assistant running and then yeah I think I'm going to go put the rack together after that and put it in here and start getting all of these punched into the patch panels so I've kind of turned my kitchen into a staging area of sorts but we have everything we need here to go ahead and start putting the rack together I put the patch panel up top that way it'll kind of straighten out the rails but as soon as we get everything else in I'm going to take the patch panel off off so I can label it and then start punching all those wires [Music] in all right now I'm going to go ahead and label these I have this already planned out where I want all of these lines to come into so I'm going to use my awesome labeler to go ahead and print off some labels for this so [Music] yeah so it's slowly coming together I actually took the door off because it was getting annoying trying to film and get in there but I have the little patch panel guys here I have my notes for which ones I need to punch them all into before I do that though I'm actually going to cut another hole in that shelf because I don't think I'm going to have enough space to pass through all the power cords that I need to pass through so I'm going to go ahead and drill this out while I have room and before I make a bigger mess [Music] all right so I've got my first little uh panel guy here and 11 and 12 is camera 1 and two so I'm going to go ahead and wire those up actually I'm going to start with my two access points that way I can test it so this will be five and six oh I miss not having my nice wire [Music] strippers okay I think that's correct I'm going to plug in the cable and double check all right you can't see it but over here on my switch I have Poe and a link so we should be good I'm going to do these all via time lapse here we [Music] go all right so sorry for the fan noise it's kind of getting a little toasty in this corner with all the lights so I have all of them terminated and I've tested at least the important ones and they all work so far so I don't have a fancy tester to test 10 gbit or anything but I'm at least getting gigabit and uh everything's working so right now I currently have this hooked up to my router so I still have Network and stuff currently but I think now I'm going to just call it quits cut the network pull everything out that doesn't need to be up here and I think I'm just going to go ahead and dropp in you can't really see my hand sorry it's a really tight angle here I think I'm going to go ahead and try to get all this stuff just completely turned off lose my network for a bit get the Rack in and try to get it all hooked up so here we [Music] go [Music] okay so I've got it in I went ahead and plug the power in for the TP Link switch just to make sure it would fit and it's pretty close I want to make sure this is angled up even though it's not supposed to be so I actually found these little L brackets out in my garage and I think I can just tilt this up where I want it at least for a temporary solution here it's not the best solution but yeah I think for now I'm just going to put those little brackets there to kind of tilt it up and I don't think it's it's going anywhere there's plenty of weight towards the back end so I think we're good so I think now I'm going to go ahead and start getting everything else [Music] in all right so to start patching stuff up I'm going to use some of these 1ot cat 6 a patch cables I got from monor price as well as some of these 6in guys these little white ones to do all of the little short runs and then I have some longer patch cables that I've made that I'll do for some of the stuff to run through the grommet and everything [Music] else all right I'm going to try to talk over this stupid TP Link switch that's super loud I'm definitely going to replace those fans and I was a little bit nervous about replacing the fans and it not getting enough air flow but um I figured out poe just does not work on this switch I'm not sure exactly why it's kind of a bummer but for the time being I just put in my little eight Port switch that has these four Poe ports which is all I need for two cameras and then two access points so I just kind of jenily put that in up on the top shelf but it actually works decently well it's in a good spot so we have Poe cameras are working access points are working all our networking is working I will get to uh 10 gig stuff later on but um yeah I actually just pulled up prox MOX here on the gecom I haven't set up tiny pilot yet I'll probably do that here in a bit but yeah it's all there but I've made a massive mess so I'm going to probably start cleaning that up and then break for lunch after lunch I set up the tiny pilot KVM and setup is a bit of an exaggeration because literally all I had to do was go to the URL and I had a KVM for my proxmox server if you need a simple KVM the tiny pilot is pretty awesome and if you're interested in one I'll make sure to have a link to their website down in the description all right so I had the switch opened up and the fans were fairly easy to get out there's just two screws for each right down here and they have these little headers that were glued on According to some guides these little guides are actually backwards let me see if I can get this one off here I'm going to flip this around so we can drop in the KN Tu us oh gosh which should actually be here any second now okay that looks good I'm going to do the other one off camera and then I'll get those knock to it fans in and really quick just to confirm that I have it right I have my ground lead and my multimeter shove into this ground thing there whatever that's called and I can see that the ground pin for the fans is this far one on the left or on the right I should say and that lines up now with the pen on the noct to a fan so these should slot in like that all right I got them installed no issues so let's uh Moment of Truth here see if it works oh wow that is like a tenth the volume still a decent amount of air flow so I did a little bit of digging around here while I had this switch open and this little Riser board up here seems to be the power delivery for all the poe and that gets power input from this power supply over here which should be supplying 53.5 volts out of this and then this runs through some filtering stuff I imagine and then into this do board and if I get my multimeter out which I'm I'm not going to try to do it one-handed right now but I only get about 1 volt out of this power power supply here and it should be giving us 53.5 for all the poe stuff and it's not I could maybe try to take that board out and see if I could figure out what's going on there but I don't really feel like trying to deal with that at least not at the moment so yeah this switch just can't do Poe so we will stick with my stop Gap solution of just having an extra switch for the meantime I'm going to go ahead and close this up but man that is so much quieter thanks noctua all right so it's actually been quite a few days of me running this setup and so far it has worked great obviously I still don't have Poe on the TPL link 24 Port because as I discussed earlier the power supply for the poe seems to just be dead but everything else is working great I haven't had any issues I have moved a few things around like for example my Lan Port from my pfSense box here actually goes to the qap switch first and then from that it goes to the 24 Port switch so the qap switch is sort of my main switch for the time being oh you might have also seen that I dropped in the sonology and the Mac Mini and the sonology I'm going to be keeping for at least a little while and the Mac Mini I'm going to keep for as long as I need to get everything sort of transferred from that over to either virtual machines or containers on my proxmox server or on one of my nases I'm still kind of figuring that out it's actually surprisingly easy to work in because it's open on the back it's pretty easy to reach in and run cables as needed I even have my it's a little awkward down here cuz I've been doing a lot of working I moved my main Naz the hard drive Haven NZ in here and that's been great with the door completely closed the temperature in here gets a bit warm although I haven't seen anything anytime I check the sonology dashboard or the dashboard for any of the switches temperatures all say that they're good I don't know what the actual temperature of good means but they all seem to be fine and my hard drives in this stay relatively cool granted it's down at the bottom but I've been keeping the door cracked for the time being and then I have some plans for getting better air flow in here for a video later on but yeah that's my new home lab setup and I'm pretty happy with it this setup is a bit unorthodox but honestly I feel like it makes sense for my channel if you think there's anything I could have done better make sure to put it in a comment down below also if you want to see more videos like like this make sure to like And subscribe and maybe even consider checking out my patreon or YouTube memberspace as I've posted a few new videos there and also have some new tears as always thank you so much for watching stay curious and I can't wait to see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 477,572

Keywords: 10Gb, 1Gb, 2.5Gb, home lab, homelab, homelab setup, kvm, mini pc, network organization, network rack at home, networking, pfsense, pfsense router, self hosting, home server, server, proxmox, home server setup, budget home lab, budget, budget home server

Id: EB0pIagC6fs

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 07 2023