My UniFi HOME NETWORK TOUR (Mid 2022)

so in my last few videos I went through a series of upgrades for my unify home network so I thought now would be a great time to give you guys a tour of what my network currently looks like at my home let's start off with my internet connection my neighborhood recently got fiber internet in fact some of my neighbors don't even have the cable buried in their yard and I was quick to jump on the bandwagon as well I've literally waited years for fiber to become available here I've always envied those fast upload speeds I mean cable was good but when I'm trying to access my network from outside the house the slower upload speeds is really limited what I could do this cable right here is the fiber connection into the house since this cable is coming from the street and is exposed to outside elements it's actually very thick for a fiber cable most of the thickness comes from the armor and sheathing of the cable to protect itself right here is where the sheathing is pulled off and you can see the thin strand of fiber going through to the other side into my network closet it's amazing how capable these very thin cables are my ISP can crank up my speeds up to 5 gigabits with this same cable and yes I am aware that the installer did a very poor job I shouldn't be able to see the thin strand from this side of the wall but that's the rant for another day let's go to the other side of this wall into my network closet right here is where the fiber cable comes into my network closet and is terminated on this little wall plate and from there there's this short fiber patch cable that connects from the wall and into my isp's modem right here now the modem I have is one of those all-in-one type of ones with a wireless access point and a router built in but since I have my own router switch and access points I put this modem into IP pass-through mode so it's basically just acting as a media converter to convert the fiber into a copper RJ45 connection now if you're using your own gear for routing and firewall like me the IP pass-through mode is actually very important because without it you'll be in a double Nat situation and you might run into issues because you have two firewalls that may be conflicting with each other so from my isps modem I have an RJ45 cable going from one of the Lan ports into the WAN Port of my unified dream router this is one of my new additions to the network it's basically the brain of my home network I previously had an USG as my router but I wanted to consolidate the router and the network controller and this thing does just that and it's priced very reasonably this does also have a built-in wireless access point but honestly I feel like I'm not making the most out of the access point because it's here in this closet which isn't exactly the ideal location to give coverage to the rest of the house speaking of access points aside from the UDR I have three additional access points two of them are actually powered using the two Poe ports on the UDR for the third one I'm using a Poe injector that came with the AP the access points I have are actually a bit outdated I have two UAC lights and one UAC in-wall now yes there are newer Wi-Fi 6 and 6 eaps out there but the advantage of those ones only show up in high density areas where you have lots of Wi-Fi devices in my house in total I have about 60 devices so these APS are more than sufficient for my needs also you need compatible devices to use Wi-Fi 6 and 6E and I don't have many of those yet now one thing I can do in the future is potentially get a long range AP and reduce the total number of APS in the house but for now this works completely fine now Wi-Fi in our house mostly just gets used on portable low performance devices like phones or tablets anything that needs stable throughput is actually connected using wired connections for that I have an RJ45 cable going from my UDR into a 24 Port gigabit switch which is right here and most of my wired devices are connected to this switch this includes things like my video streaming devices my NVR a printer a couple of computers and some other miscellaneous devices this is a slightly older version of unify's 24 Port switch but for now it has lots of room for expansion so I'm not really in any rush to upgrade this speaking of wired connections all the like Eastern objects within the house terminate into this patch panel here this house actually didn't have ethernet built in but one day I discovered that all the phone jacks in my home were actually using cat 5e cables so I just took advantage of those along with a few new cable runs and retrofitted the house with ethernet in rooms where I needed it going back to my 24 Port switch it has two SFP ports which are technically meant for aggregated Uplink connections but I'm using one of them to connect a DAC cable to hook up to my unify switch aggregation which is my 10 gig switch for my really high performance devices like my Nas and my video editing rig now I know this switch isn't meant to be an end user switch like I'm using but honestly this is a Hidden Gem in unify's lineup for someone looking to have a subset of 10 gig devices for high bandwidth throughput between them I know this switch gets a lot of flack for not being layer 3 and not having RJ45 ports but I think if you use this strategically it can provide a lot of value for a relatively low cost now in a hypothetical world where I get an udm Pro or udmse I would change up the network topology a bit where my 10 gig switch would be what connects to the router directly and my 24 Port switch would connect to my 10 gig switch that would make more sense from a network topology perspective but in a home environment like mine it really doesn't make much of a difference either way connected to this 10 gig switch are four devices three of them are right next to the switch so they're connected using DAC cables and one of them is another room for that I actually ran a fiber cable and connected using fiber transceivers out of the three devices in this room connected to this switch one is my Synology Nas this is my primary storage device in the house and most of my working files are stored here it's a six Bay Nas and I currently have it populated with six eight terabyte hard drives configured with two Drive redundancy so effectively I have roughly 30 terabytes of storage after factoring in all the overheads the second device I have connected to this switch is this machine that I repurposed as a true Nas server it serves as a supplementary Nas in my environment I basically had an old computer and a bunch of hard drives laying around so I just put them to use to put this together the third device in this room connecting to my 10 gig switch is a Windows computer that I run certain services on all three of these devices transfer a lot of data between each other for scheduled tasks and backups and stuff so having a 10 gig connectivity between those speeds up a lot of these tasks the fourth device that's connected using the fiber cable is actually my desktop computer in my home office I actually recently made a video showing how I ran the fiber cable to my office so check that out if you haven't already for all these 10 gig devices I purchased some melanox connect X3 network cards from eBay they work seamlessly with my SFP plus only 10 gig switch and was a fraction of the cost of any RJ45 10 gig cards so that's pretty much all the networking gear in this room aside from these I do have a few other things in this room like my NVR it's a Lorex 8 channel NVR I got from Costco that came with eight cameras let me know in the comments if you want me to make a video about the security cameras I use I honestly can make an entire video just talking about that additionally I have this HDMI over IP transmitter connected to my home network this goes hand in hand with my NVR because I use the HDMI output from the NVR and connect to this device and throughout the house I have the receiver modules on different TVs that way I can view my security cameras on any TV just by switching to the right HDMI input it's a really neat device for broadcasting the same video signal to multiple TVs within your home network I also made a video about this device so check that out if you're interested also everything in this room is powered through this UPS I have it's a 1500 VA rack mountable unit from APC I actually got it for free from a company that was closing one of its offices and I just changed the battery recently so this thing is as good as new if I ever have a power outage this thing can keep all the gear in this room running for at least 15 minutes or so that gives me some time to shut things down if I need to also to monitor how much power all this equipment is using I have the input to the UPS connected through a tp-link smart plug through the app I can get a reading of the power draw from this plug one other neat little Gadget I have is this Govi Wi-Fi temperature sensor this room is actually not air conditioned so I have to leave the door open to the adjacent room to make sure it doesn't get too hot if the temperatures do get hot I get an alert from this device on my phone so that's pretty much it now is this the final setup well knowing me probably not I'm always itching to change things up to keep things interesting I already have a few devices in mind to change up within the next few months now one likely comment that I'll get is about how messy my network closet is and why don't I get a small Network rack why am I using this bookshelf to hold my networking gear well I'm actually working on that right now I really only have two rack mountable devices well actually three if you count the UPS so getting a rack won't entirely solve this mess also calling the is a networking closet is actually misleading this is actually a multi-purpose closet that I just happen to have my networking gear in but I am working on some ideas to tidy up all of this gear in fact if you have some ideas let me know in the comments I'm open to doing some DIY stuff as well as getting a small rack for some of the networking gear but make sure to subscribe because I will make a video about tidying up this place when I get to it in the coming weeks anyways I hope you enjoyed this video as always stay safe and I'll see you again on the next one

Channel: TechTalk with Samir

Views: 19,352

Keywords: unifi, unifi home network, unifi dream router, unifi dream machine, unifi dream machine pro, udm pro, udm se, UDR, home network, UAP-AC-Lite, Unifi access point, wifi, mesh wifi, lorex, lorex nvr, govee temperature sensor, apc ups, network closet, home network tour, smart home tour, wireless access points, connected home, fiber internet, fiber cable, 10 gig networking, 10gbe, 10 gigabit, 10 gigabit switch, unifi switch aggregation, unifi 24 port switch, tp link smart plug

Id: Yb4CygZlkI4

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2022