The Homelab Show: Episode 6 Physical Networking

action that's promising that's promising make sure i'm muted over here yep i got everything muted i think we're ready to go oops hold on the heck is that loose speaker wire one second oh boy technical difficulties we're not supposed to have technical difficulties i i know well actually it took me a few minutes i had accidentally unplugged earlier my usb to my thing so all right now we're officially started now everything's plugged back in and i won't kick speaker wires anymore to pop the speakers out welcome to the home lab show episode 6 physical networking i'm tom lawrence and this is jay lacroix yes we want to talk about the physical layer and we did talk about networking and firewalls but we want to dive a little bit deeper into some of the things like 10 gig and racks and you know it's perfectly timed you know this is self-serving it's not just for the audience this actually can help jay because he's it's time to buy a new wreck among other things there's other things they'll be asking too and this is one of the greatest things about home lab is because you know you get acquainted with people and when you don't know the answer to something then maybe someone else will and then everyone in the group so to speak you know kind of share tips and information so it's always great to get another mindset because sometimes they thought of a better idea than you and it's like man why didn't i think of that that's so cool yeah and right away me and jay because he didn't know this existed and i only i only found out i think last year um for people normally when we're putting racks in for businesses we're not thinking about the noise factor that's why they call it the wiring closet or the server room that's that noisy place where all this stuff goes and uh so i think we actually started out mentioning uh enclosures now if the uh i i think one of the fun things i i love seeing in home lab and don't get me um i i'm not gonna say this is something we'd ever install in the business but i think it's clever there is ikea hacks and it's taking ikea stuff that measures the same width as server distances and there's a handful of different tables i think that's cool but we're not going to dive into that today but i have no problem at all anyone who builds their home lab based on ikea furniture i think that's pretty cool i just won't i can't install it on customers we are going to keep this a little bit more towards stuff you can buy stuff that's made for actual server rooms but i want to start out with a 12u enclosure server cabinet made by tech that's called the um does it have an actual name or is it just 12 you quiet rack we will start doing some show notes and leave links so you can find these things but this is kind of a neat feature that um i mentioned to jay because he like myself is he's using i have a rack in my studio so i can't have noisy things in there and jay doesn't want noisy things in his so they actually make these 12u enclosures by start uh star trek they might make some uh different sized ones as well but they're made specifically with sound insulation in them so they're kind of a neat they are not budget friendly um i'll admit i'm looking at this thing to cost right around fourteen hundred dollars so this is not your cheap option for starting your home lab but i wanted to mention for those of you that do have a budget for this it's a neat idea because it's a complete sound encapsulation type of rack um it's it's worth noting on something like that so if you've got the budget and you want it in your close proximity but you have a noise pollution problem with it this is uh definitely an idea i'd actually tweeted out about one of my staff who was his true nasa system he had to upgrade with some be quiet fans because noise pollution in his uh home office was a little bit of an issue so this this does come up um yeah from time to time so a little bit of background um if you are on the live stream or if you've seen any of my videos in the past year or so you see the server rack behind me and for those of you that are listening on the podcast audio version um you know behind me is a black server rack that looks like it's enclosed because it has a glass front panel but it's not i'm a bonehead i you know i'm a hypocrite i always tell everyone you know read carefully make sure it's the right fit and i impulsively bought it without any research at all i'll admit and what i found out was i'm like oops this is a network um cabinet not a server cabinet so it looks fully enclosed and people ask me what rack are you using i want one like that no i don't even tell people what it is because i don't want anyone to buy it it's not for that it's for switches so the back of it is completely open and it's kind of loud but no one hears it because i have filters so that kind of cancel that out and then i look at my desk the other day and it's starting to kind of bend downward so now i have some decisions to make hence the conversation tom and i are having and then we're like yeah i think we should or tom was like yeah we should probably talk about the rack part of it because you got to have something to put your stuff into yeah now there's this is all talking about something close so jay has a like he said not the right depth one but it is it does create an enclosed rack uh you can get some what are a whole lot cheaper of course you can start with your two post rack you can start with your four post rack the two post one are cool if you've got a basement but you have to secure the base and a lot of servers actually support kind of mid mount and you can balance them and there's not the best idea but we are always trying to be as budget conscious uh as possible with a lot of the homeland people you're getting started on there the best news is if you can find a local recycler you will find these things thrown out all the time you can check craigslist facebook marketplace offer up those are common ones at least here in the united states where you'll find a lot of these and if you keep an eye out for one you'll find someone going can you get this thing out of my building and you can sometimes get it for next to nothing or sometimes just for the pickup depending on where it's at so that's there's definitely some different opportunities in there but if you are looking for a few of them we will leave some links in the show notes for some of the ones you can purchase new which are still reasonably priced um we actually have built a lot of the 25 u racks with the rollers on them that's even what i just put in my basement i don't have much in my basement but it's more future thinking if i did it's the one i have in my studio is a 25u and it's where we mount everything for the studio demos when i'm doing videos in there same thing it's a 25u four post open doesn't do anything for sound deadening but having everything rack mounted is really nice now let's move a little bit over to the wiring side of things because that's where if some people will just run the wires and just plug them right into the switch and that's fine until you want to get things a little bit more advanced or you want to get into the way it's actually done in a more enterprise environment which i think is a huge learning the physical part of how that's set up and why you set it up that way is big and i'm going to say in those cases you can start with and you can physically put this in your closet and separate from your server case but this is where your all your punch downs are going to go and i'm a big fan of and i've used a lot of the cable matters ones there's some other ones out there cable matters i think is really nice they're easily found on ebay for reasonable prices and cable matters makes a modular 24 port keystones type of punch panel so what the keystones are is when you're running the different cable you're going to punch them down into that and that creates a really nice clean look if you go to reddit our cable porn you'll see all these people talking about it and you'll see everything mounted up with these keystones now you can do those separate where you put them physically in your closet like at a home or something like that and you run all of your wires that are coming from around the house and that's a good place to punch them down and you can get one of those units and actually that's what the rack that's behind jay and many of his videos that's more what that's designed for is to put some smaller switches always before you get one of those measure the depth to make sure they work but um even if you get a really shallow one or a little tiny one there's a lot of options if you look there are ways to mount switches so instead of going uh vertically they flip they they they go long side down you can actually do and we've done some clean installs for clients that don't have any on-prem servers we've turned the switches the other way you can actually turn the switches in a punch down so they're actually facing up and the bottom of the switch well the back of the switch is actually facing straight down if you can picture that that's another way you can mount them when you're space constrained and we do this in small medical offices and things like that because a lot of them don't have any on-prem server equipment and it becomes a really nice clean install then you can just run one wire over to your server rack where all the other equipment is so you don't have to necessarily run if you've got 10 cables around your house for cameras for wi-fi or you know wiring up the other rooms when you punch them all down you can keep it pretty clean like that how are yours done jay not like that uh not the way it could be um i'm doing it the first way you mentioned where i just have the cables ran it's something on my list to do to get a actual patch panel um there's another side of my network you don't see in here so i have a separate fully enclosed well it's not fully enclosed it's got holes in it but it's an enclosed little rack that houses my main switch the cable modem the ups for the internet gear um so that's just all the boring stuff that people in video you know videos don't really care about and it's in another room and it's just the cables come you know through the wall down into the back of it and i just plug it straight into the switch so eventually i do plan on doing an actual patch panel it's just one of the things on my list of you know stuff to do that i never get to but i i will someday yeah yeah it's um getting it's best if you can do this when you start a lot of people because it becomes that much more of a task when you put it off this is this is where you see reddit our cable fail that's how you're like how did it get this way well it started as a small problem no one to deal with uh 40 more wires were added so now it's a 40 more wire problem that no one wants to deal with another side note to the um when you're using the modular ones too is especially in a home environment you can get hdmi jacks for example and you can run some of the other non-necessary network thing into those uh type of keystone jacks they're they're very flexible like that and i commented i had a recent video and i can leave a link to that in the show notes where i discuss some of the other options including usb if they actually have for example and because i'm like looking right now at j in the video if you're looking or as jay said in his videos where he's got that rack behind him if you have a server and you have usbs on the back of the server and you have a patch panel above the server you can actually get a kit so you can extend the usbs off the back of the server and bring them to the keystones and then when you open up the rack door you can actually plug things directly in in case the there's not very many usbs available on the front of the server and you have a need to get to them you can actually extend the back ones out there there's a lot of cool things you can do once you get into the modular keystones while also keeping it very very clean i'm going to be doing some videos soon exactly how to clean up the cabling there's a couple of methodologies where you pull the cables through trim them off pull them back and snap the keystones on and snap them in you want that really universal look there's a few instructions out there i haven't done a detailed video but you can always see the end result it gives it such a nice look and also please never use zip ties especially in a home lab i always go velcro because you'll change things a lot and velcro is nice it slides off real easy it's satisfying sound it makes when it pulls apart and velcro i call them zip ties but they're not um but as an aside like i can i can um greatly enhance the importance of this by mentioning i found out really uh the hard way why you should not use the actual zip ties because i'm lucky i'm still alive actually because earlier in my career i'm talking you know when i was just help desk levels so just kind of starting out i go to the shop floor because the build the company i work for had an office side and then a a shop side or like a factory and all the guys there zip tied everything and everything they were just zip tie happy i i've never seen anything like it like the guy asked for a replacement keyboard so you know i grab a keyboard i have like 30 of them and i get to his desk and he has the keyboard cable zip tied to all the other cables around the desk so one by one i get a utility knife which is the worst thing you can do by the way and i'm just sawing at each one i keep going then i slip and my hand goes into the power cord for the computer with a metal utility knife right into it now obviously it's not the zip ties fault because um you know i'm a klutz but um velcro so much easier just just on just unwrap it and you're done um and after that day i have never bought the plastic zip ties again considering how accident-prone i actually am so um i felt electricity in my body and i could not talk i could not move um and i it was just bad so don't use plastic zip ties ever that's that's my opinion anyway but maybe i'm a little biased now after that incident to be fair yeah it's one of those things once you've worked with a lot of network cabling or cable cleanup jobs especially there's two different types of the there's the pull through zip ties that are usually you can buy in a bulk package and each one's exactly the same length and has a little hole trimmed in it so they wrap around the cable and pull through those are really nice the other thing we use too is you can buy bulk spools of it that have a trim off and one side has the um you know adheres to the other side those are great too because then you just trim them to length you just roll it around something real quick and trim roll it around trim so you'll actually do bundles of cables and you just quickly wrap them real quick trim it real quick done and those are they're so reasonable they're still velcro so there's a lot of trust me when you want to be able to have your lab be flexible and still look nice and there's something to be said for it looking nice i i have seen a lot of people say i don't have time for cable management but i will i feel better about it that i know there are differing opinions that some people have on this my mine is always of my cables have to be managed that's cables in general like um if anyone goes online and looks at a picture of my office i mean i still have some work to do but you'll you'll notice that my monitor and for those of you listening to to the audio um my monitor is actually on the wall from you know the video people you know that one right there yep on the wall and you won't see any cables because i bought a kit where i actually cut a hole in the drywall and there's a fixture that you put in there runs the cables through the wall and you won't even see them and it's got an easy access thing where i can you know pull cables down if i need to the cable management is like the bane of my existence and it's not even limited to home lab like just the other day i'm rearranging the cables to a retro gaming side of the office and i have like eight or nine consoles on there oh my gosh it was the worst thing ever to manage those cables so that's why i have a lot of respect for people that could do it well like you tom you do it better than i do for sure i've seen your pictures on your twitter so um i'm trying to get to that level i think yeah it's it takes time it's also experience doing it and if you start it out though you'll you would be better if you work towards that goal from the get-go now um i've seen in the comments uh here in the livestream one of the things that i is definitely worth mentioning is getting uh like the vented trays uh this they're usually called like the startech makes a 2u vented server rack mount tray the tray is great uh when you put them in a rack and they sell them in different depths because the cable modem uh which is going to be probably the more frequently or you know even even if it's not capable of however your internet provider provides you some type of on-prem equipment very frequently that that on-prem equipment is not rack mounted and that's where the tray they usually sell some short depth trays you can mount they mount the same way to the rack and they are really handy we usually set everything on there i save vented ones specifically though i prefer those because one of the things we'll do is run the little velcro through the holes in the vents and hold all the wires down so everything stays nice and neat in there it makes it a little bit nicer not to the detriment so to speak of being able to slide it out so you want to make sure the wires aren't everywhere but we'll take like the power supply and just run one of those velcros around it through the vent holes just so everything's got this kind of nice clean i know where everything is nothing's going to fall off and more importantly if someone pulls a wire a little bit it won't slide the wire unpower a device that might be sitting on those trays that's kind of a good other way to help hold that all together i think it also is a good idea to buy the right length of network cables instead of just buying like a you know 20 units of uh you know 10 foot cable that you know that's already done you're gonna buy a cable and you're not you know cutting the cable yourself if you can learn how to cut your own cable and do the ends that's even better at the very least if you're not going to do that it it you know if you only have like two feet to go don't buy a 10-foot cable for that you know you could you could you basically will end up with a really clean looking server rack in the front but then when you look around the back you see this wad of excess cable that you didn't know what to do with um that's never a good thing either so just buy what you need and power cords too a lot of people don't realize this but the server power cords you could buy in different sizes as well so if you only if you have like a pdu in your server rack and you only need to go like a short distance from the power of the server to that pdu you don't need a five foot power cable for that you could buy a smaller one and when you do things like that you won't really have to do cable management as much because it kind of does it itself because the cables are the exact length that you need and that could really help too so one of the things in you mentioned like pdu or power distribution unit um there's a crossover it turns out in the audio market so people who use professional dj equipment actually have a lot of the same stuff so you you can use and i've recommended before and i have these uh like i said this will be links in the show notes so you can see the exact models um but there are some of them that have nice switches on the front and server people panicked like what do you mean you would put power switches on the front so someone could just turn things off i'm like no from a homeland perspective i have all of them labeled so i know what i'm turning off that way if i got to power something down or something and whatnot you can put them right on the front you could also uh if you bought one of those open post racks you could put them on the back side that's actually where i have mine mounted at home it's on the flip side of it so if i need to power off something or make sure something's powered on i can just flip switches on it so those are um another another little detail on there to make sure believe it or not like you mentioned it like like um and you and i haven't even talked about this because it's not even server related but i bought one because i managed like a a large number of video game consoles from the 90s and and up on one tv and the vampire power from all the standby power from each of those is hard so i actually bought exactly that it's made for audio people but i just you know i labeled each switch this is the super nintendo this is the nintendo and then in the back i bought these one foot or no i think they're like three or four inch um power cord extenders because you don't have these wall warts right yeah and everything i'm mentioning is is good for home lab people too because you could have these big power adapters you don't want to hang a big power adapter off the you know side of your uh pdu you could just buy this little expender and plug it in and then it makes it a lot easier to manage you don't have one power brick blocking another outlet which is often something that happens and then when you mention powering things off i i fully support that i think that's something a lot of people don't realize if you know you're in a home lab unless you're running your company out of a home lab chances are you sleep right and there's there's probably not people that in your house that are awake all night turn it off put the power to it um there's nothing wrong with that because why pay for any amount of power if you're not actually using it unless you have backups running all night maybe you have a backup night where everything sinks or something like that yeah cut it off that's fine uh you'll save some money yep now one final thing and then we're going to move on to the cabling side of things as i know people that's one of them that i know there's going to be a lot of questions a lot of discussion but when it comes to uh the mounting things in the rack we did some review of rack studs and i'm actually shocked i'm just really surprised how well they held up we did some stress testing with them we were we were laying weights after weights on there so i have a whole video on what it took to to break the rack studs and we weren't testing the shear we were testing i think it's a tensile strength it was a stretch i'm not a i'm not a structural engineer but either way take it for what it's worth we put some seriously heavy weights on things like literally one of my staff brought their weights in and we set all the weights from his lifting stuff on there and uh once we got all that on there it it held up amazingly well so rack studs are cool and what the rack studs allow you to do is pop them all in there and when you want to slide something in and out of the rack to change it no screwdriver necessary they're all thumb screws and they actually hold really really well um this is particularly handy like when you you know especially when you're doing testing of equipment uh swapping those things around this happens to be quite a bit of it um now let's talk about cabling because boy that's a lot yeah this is a long one now patch cables you're right buy the length you need because you want to patch it from where you put the punch downs over to the switch and those are easier bought pre-made they're also well bought if you take and want some of the thin ones there's a couple of those i'll leave links to all the different ones out there and you probably don't need the boots but the thin ones are nice but the thin ones do have a limit when it comes to some of the poe so take that for what it's worth and where you're using those the cable itself though the most frequent question that comes up to us uh when it comes to people contacting is people are always like hey i'd like to wire up my new house that i'm building or new building i want to future proof it should i just run fiber everywhere that is absolutely probably not a great idea there's going to be someone who's going to disagree with me there's going to be someone who says well fiber is faster et cetera et cetera but it's not easy to work with as a first problem it does not work very well and the adapters are not universally as acceptive as the standard rj45 type plug it was pretty much even here in 2021 despite fiber having been around for like ever at least 20 plus years you still want to run standard copper cabling now let's get yeah now the type of cabling cat5 is actually i i have a video i did called out of spec you can do things a bit out of spec and if you have cat5 you'd be shocked to learn it probably not guarantee it will not certify with a cable certifier of course but it will probably have no problem running at 10 gig you are actually listening to this podcast with a computer that i'm using connected at 10 gig using cat5 it goes about 20 feet down the hall to my 10 gig switch so the definitely do it yeah you can get away with it so if you have cat5 and you're going do i need to replace this to get faster speeds in my house you can probably get away with if they're short distances it might work it's not a guarantee but try it um the same thing goes with like i seen someone right away in the comments saying what about cat eight and cat eight's not worth it either yeah cat eight is um not really future proofing and it's a little bit kind of high priced right now what you want to think about is do you need cat 6 or cat 6 a cat 6 goes 10 gig no problem but over short distances but those distances are probably more related to how far you can go in a house if you look at something like cat 6 a cat 6a will go much longer distance and will maintain 10 gigs so you kind of it's not like you're going to get anything better and 10 gig is 10 gig by the way these are digital signals this is not like there's a difference like if i took a piece of cat 6a at 20 feet and a piece of cat 6 at 20 feet they connect to 10 gig you don't get a better transfer out of either one of them they connect at 10 gig that's it they don't go faster it's a digital signal right yep and and i mean future proofing only goes so far because i mean you can make the argument that cabling doesn't change nearly as fast as the it industry in general but it's kind of funny when people say future proofing and they're talking about technology because for all we know like something could come out tomorrow that's going to totally throw everything upside down um you know stranger things have happened you can only do so much you're trying to eliminate any possibility you're going to have to pull the cables out and re-run them i don't want to do that either but just go with the best possible solution that's available today and don't worry so much about what might happen in 10 years i mean you might even sell your house in six years who knows right so it just depends on the situation yeah so the one thing is when you go to the cat um and you just if you want to run cat6a the next thing people seem to tell me and i don't know where they get this information from so it's pretty well documented in the spec you do not need to get shielded unless you're experiencing some interference in there so for the most part you can get away without it being shielded you can just get the basic stuff they sell this at most of your local hardware stores like home depot and lowe's here in america has it it's not that hard to obtain but big warning right here make sure if you see a box that seems suspiciously less money when you're buying cable you be very aware of why it's less money it's called copper clad aluminum and if you see what they've done is they take aluminum and they coat it with copper which of course aluminum is cheaper than copper and people end up going hey i have all kinds of problems with this i'm like yes that cable is very low quality you want a pure copper cable it does save you some money but it may not save you the headache of it and i've not heard good things about those um i'm fuzzy on how well tested that is i've heard a lot of people tell me a lot of bad things about it we never tried it never used it um i just know from other technicians and because i was really curious myself when i see when years ago when it started popping up on the market i'm like why is this box so much cheaper than the other boxes especially about 10 years ago when scrap metal prices got a little bit exuberant cable prices were unfortunately affected by that so it was hard to find good deals on cable and that's when that came into the market and i'm like what's the what's the catch this you didn't suddenly magically make the price of copper drop oh you're just using less copper i experienced that myself actually i i think i remember going to home depot or lowe's i can't remember i want to say it was about 100 or something which is fine but then a local computer store near the company where i was working i think it was thirty dollars for a thousand feet versus like a hundred or something like that um so i bought the cheaper one and then that that was way back when i first learned how to crimp the network cables and i was proud of myself i learned how to do it i could attach a cable tester it passed the test so i i felt like i knew what i was doing i could get it perfect every single time but then later on the cables would just stop working like they would just start having errors and i'm like what's going on here i'd and it would fail a test like i'd attach a tester to it a known good cable that passed the test before failed the test now and i had to rerun the cable again and at first i'm like yeah that's just a one off no problem and then another one and then another one and then another one and then it got to the point where i had to rerun a cable every um other month and i'm like what is going on um but better quality cable um i mean it goes without saying spend the extra money um that i don't know what i bought or what kind it was i know it was cat 5e that i do know but that's what they told me but you said headache yeah yeah i think you remember me calling you up a long time ago my access points aren't working right and then after a month of fighting and i'm like oh the cable's bad you know just get you okay i and it's funny i've seen in the comments in the live stream here uh this is a myth i've seen uh come up quite a bit can cables be too short and i'm one of my friends and maybe i'll get him on a channel sometime he gave me the history of this and it came he he told me he's been a cisco guy since the earliest days of cisco and he told me it was um according to him at least the this was propagated by a bunch of cisco engineers that used to say there was a minimum length that you had to have for a patch cable to work and he never understood why electrically because he's a pretty smart guy and he says he never understood it used to argue with him and that's all been scrubbed like they don't say that anymore but he goes that was perpetuated by a lot of different sales engineers that there was a minimum length for patch cable there is not as short as will fit is perfectly fine there's not a too short of a length um the theory was at least this myth perpetuated by these sales engineers as legend goes was that if you had it if you got two switches too close together or a device too close together with it it wouldn't uh do some there wasn't enough twist to make it actually work um that's now the twists do cancel out the noise and i won't dive too deep into that rabbit hole because it's not where i'm at expert but i will and this is something i think shall leave both of these links in here if you want to dive deep into cable standards um because i didn't because i'm not an expert i had an expert guest come on my channel and me and dan barrera who literally works on the standards committee he's among the people that certified cat 7 and cat 8 to exist so he he's he's an engineer by trade uh so he when he reviews cabling standards presented by companies he tests them for the engineering and making sure that the signal ratios and we dive all over the place it's a it's there's two different episodes i have with him it is wonderful i rewatched it myself to pick up because mostly he talks not me because he is really smart at this stuff so if you ever want to dive into how electrically all of this functions it's great yeah definitely yeah definitely a rabbit hole you can go into it it is um but to me is when people tell me i'm wrong about something i'm like oh no i remember what he said and in the podcast or episode where i recorded with him so i just sent him a link i said i'm not an expert on this but this guy literally sets the standard so argue with his answers a matter of fact he replies to a lot of people's comments so i think one thing we probably should talk about but i don't think either one of us wants to talk about this but i think it's something we kind of have to and that's power line networking um it's like oh god that really do we have to um because you know it's just one of those things where the idea is great you could just magically transport um you know over power lines and one thing i i do understand and this is going to be a common thread i think there's going to be a lot of people out there that they rent their house they don't own it so they can't really modify it and then their options are either go all wireless if they can if they don't have crazy things in the walls that block the signal but then sometimes there's a viable um thing for a reason for power line and i'll give you one edge case that was really really weird um my son's ps4 stopped connecting via wi-fi and at the time i assumed that the wi-fi card was toast and that was back when we were renting so i i ran powerline for that and it worked for him i later found out that unify had a weird update that broke ps4 compatibility and as soon as he hatched it then his wi-fi card magically started working again but also you know renting it's hard to make modifications especially if you want to keep your security deposit so um for me personally now we own this house so it's like i feel like i'm just it's just being in awe of the fact that i can do stuff i could run cable i can have actual jacks and do it the right way it's a great feeling but until you get to that point um powerline is one of those things where they'll advertise a crazy fast speed the one i have that i don't use now was like 2 000 megabits or something like that you'll never get that from there but that's what they advertise and i think we got like 150 to 200 so yeah one of those things that's like um you're just allowing a bunch of errors it's like you're throwing a ball at a target and you're gonna hit it one out of 100 times right um if you keep throwing it in that general direction that seems to be kind of how the signal is it's just um due to the errors you're not going to get the full speed but it is what it is what do you think on that you know i i've heard a lot of people complain about them and it seems to vary from environments but but the overall verdict is they're not wonderful and it's but it's a challenge if you are leasing a place renting a place you're unable to modify the structure of where you live in any way the options really come down to and someone actually messaged and i think it was in my forums and i thought this was a clever solution um they grabbed because they had them a couple site-to-site devices and pointed them at each other from the basement to the upstairs and that's how they got the internet working because it will travel not a guaranteed to work it depends on the the structure inside your house a lot but they were able to get to site to sites to link inside their house and i thought that was a funny way to fix networking issues when you want to get it from one place to another so that one uh that one made me laugh yeah yeah um the powerline one i don't know if there's enough demand to make that technology better it seems to be hit and miss i debated about buying a couple to see if there's a if it's a brand because people seem to complain about them and we have actually you know we see a lot of people asking about cabling to solve the problem but i don't know enough about the brands to have um a clear knowledge of is one brand better than the other or is it a scenario based problem where the way the wiring is if it is if it's too many plugs away does it not work but if it's on the same circuit does it work better there's a lot of analysis that i don't know but it's it's also something especially if you're leasing a place you may not know as much about the wiring because you don't have a map of it and you may not have any options to change it so it's one of those plug it in see if it works maybe you'll get a good connection maybe you won't it's a gamble i don't i don't those are last resort in my opinion it is last resort i think i might i have a theory on why they don't make them better and that theory is if you have let's say uh a 2 000 megabit um version which of course you're not going to get that but you you're going to get maybe 200 let's just say hypothetically yeah a lot of people out there they don't even have a 200 megabit internet connection now granted nowadays that's more likely to happen but when i first bought this one that was less likely so the argument can be made and this could also be made in in your house if your internet connection is 75 megabits then 200 megabits even though it's not the advertised 2000 it's fine you're you're still able to get the internet speed that you're paying for through that um obviously for home labors a problem comes in where you want to migrate a vm from one proxmox node to another and now all of a sudden that 200 megabits that's going to be very painful especially if you're doing large file transfers you're going to really notice it then but for people that you know aren't doing things like that if they have an internet connection 100 megabit whatever it is that you know kind of not that great power line adapters probably perfectly fine for them um i think in order for that to get better us you know home lab people are going to have to put pressure on them hey we matter too we want to send large files from one end to the other we we actually do that kind of thing but they're going to make the assumption as a business case that you know you have 802.11 ac which is going to be orders of magnitude faster than that so if you wanted you know you don't want to run cable you could just run through wi-fi even though we'll argue that's still not the greatest wired is always better but from the uh from the mindset of the manufacturers they probably think that way it there has to be a big use case for them to think if there's only like a couple you know maybe 10 000 people that care um i'm not saying that's the number that could be a problem now that's just a guess but i think the point though is if you are only concerned with getting the internet to a desktop in another room and your internet connection is slower than the max speed you get off the power line there's probably no reason not to use it but when you you know want to actually do file transfers that's you're gonna yeah that's not gonna be very very nice at all yeah now um i reading back to the comments one thing that i didn't mention but of course i don't know any easy way to say this other than comply with whatever laws are in your area when it comes to doing this um this is something in the business world me i am based out of the state of michigan just south of detroit we don't actually have any specific code rules regarding low voltage cabling but some other states in the us have very specific where you have to be a licensed installer at all to touch them sometimes they cross over with a light either have a separate one or you need to be an electrician's license so you do have to be careful to make sure you're complying with whatever laws govern your area when you're putting these in and a side note of that is whether or not you need to use plenum uh plenum wire is a fire rating for it i had a really interesting debate with someone and saved them a fortune because they they were convinced prior to me proving it to them they were a chief tech officer for a large company we were doing an install for they were burying all the cable underground and pouring cement over it all in conduit it's a really cool setup that we did for them they wanted to run plenum because they were insistent plenum was faster and i'm like that's a burn rating that's a phys if it runs in the plenum as in the air space above your head there are there are codes in michigan that say yes if it's in an open air space that airspace is shared with your heat heating cooling system um we have to have a fire and burn rating of these plenum so that is code to use that but when you're running it underground it doesn't really need to be because it's in an enclosed outside of the air space where it shared that so we actually saved them a fortune because 99 of their wires were all underneath the buildings with part of the build and uh but you may have to use that these it always is important to stay in compliance now plenum does have a premium cost attached to it but a lot of times it's if you're putting it into walls and things like that it's just not necessary that's actually why the other type of cable is called riser it's for the rise up areas as in in the walls and things like that that's a very good point yeah definitely check your local regulations and uh yeah see see what it is yeah so those are little little nuances details in there now one of the next things to talk about is let's talk about 10 gig and this is where if you're doing it physically locally and let's say you're building a stack of servers and you want to use 10 gig and someone's going to point out we're just not going to get too deep into the rabbit hole yes there are faster than 10 gig speeds but i think what's the most affordable for the home lab people in terms of switches and in terms of buying cards is definitely 10 gig the it's been around since i think the standard came out in 2006 for it it's it's been around long enough that there's numerous iterations that are cheap on ebay like the intel uh 520 cards and i'll leave some links in the show notes to these i think they're intel da 520 cards that are sfp which sfp is for running things in your rack it's for shorter distance sfp plus make sure we have that labeled right sfp physically is the same as sfp plus electrically it's different so those things will slip in there but if you want to go 10 gig in your servers you want to make sure it's sfp plus with an sfp plus cable or if you're just going server to server it looks really cool to do fiber but it's not it's not any faster it you can just buy the little they're called dac direct attached copper cables and sfp plus dac cables and sfp switches especially the maker tick switches meeker tick hands down if you are looking for budget 10 gig that's new not used on ebay there's always that's a different wild card of finding something used mikrotik still has some of the cheapest ones that little four port micro tick it's like 129 to get four ports of 10 gig i can't even touch that like that's even hard to find used on ebay a 10 gig switch but that's a brand new price for the micro tick one but it's all dac it's all direct attached copper or you can like i said put the uh cop uh put the fiber in there if you wanted but that's a great way if you want your vms to transfer faster especially if you want to run 10 gig between your trunas server and your proxmox your xcpng or whatever hypervisor is your preference that is a great way to do it you get a couple of these cards you get one of those and it does have a standard copper rj45 on the other side and that allows you to plug it into the rest of your network but the servers can happily talk to each other in a budget-friendly way i'm gonna add that to there because so i did see someone at least posted show me the 40 gig stuff and i'm like i know but that's generally goes a little beyond the budget of most of the homeland people don't don't get me wrong it's really cool that would be nice so in my case like in my situation i have one proxmox server i used to have two i'm gonna go back to two i'm not i decided not to do shared storage um i don't mind waiting longer um the server that i have has nvme storage on there so it's pretty fast so when i'm doing backups to trunas i'm gonna want to have 10 gig just to make the backups happen faster and if i had a new proxmox server which i think i'm going to buy then even if i'm doing live migration without shared storage it is just going server to server which is a lot slower that would happen a lot quicker with uh 10 gigs so i think i'm going to be in the market for this and i'm going to be looking at these links too and probably upgrading that because i mean normally i don't mind waiting a long time for the the migrations and the backups and things but if i can make it quicker and it doesn't cost that much i may as well you know make that faster yeah the um those cards like i said the intel ones you can find those in in the price range of i think i bought the last ones brand new they were a box of them on ebay and i bought a few of them i think they were like 66 67 each they were they were just not that expensive they were i got them on a good price i've seen them go as much as 90 but that's still their 2.10 gig that's plenty especially if you put them in a lag together now you have you know a potentially larger pipeline for more tasks it is definitely it's it's definitely getting much more affordable to do those things now the other thing i want to mention is the 10 gig modules i've covered a few of those 10 gig modules before you have to be careful because one of the confusions people get you can buy a switch that has sfp modules cheaper than you can buy a switch that has 10 gig rj45s so what people do is they buy a switch and they go hey i only need a couple copper rj45s to go across some distance of my house maybe back to the garage where you have a server or wherever you might have it but you have to watch when you use the modules the modules themselves even if you're on cat 6a they don't necessarily go the full distance for that and this is one of those little nuances you have to make sure you're reading the modules because it's only recently that fs.com well i should say in more recent time depends on when you're listening to us came out with modules that support greater than 30 meters that used to be a limit a lot of the modules had and this is also what creates some of that confusion for people is they're going well i want to do this but then i realized it's not working and i don't know why and i'm like read the details what part number did you get and they're like oh this doesn't go that distance but the cabling does i'm like yes the cabling does now you got to go buy a more expensive switch this is some of that nuance but it's really important to look through these things when you're purchasing these modules the second thing about these modules is the if you buy a 10 gig go ahead you froze for a out of the last uh 15 seconds or so ah sorry i didn't know so you might froze too the the uh other challenge is if you have one of those intel cards that i mentioned and you pop in the uh modules those modules frequently don't work with a lot of cards those cards were meant to support deck i found people that think hey i can get a budget here i can get a dual 10 gig card for cheap and i can get a couple of these cheap modules on amazon and slap them all together then they don't link anymore so it's kind of you got to be careful and make sure all these things are compatible with each other and i'll leave links to some of the videos where i break some of that down to help clear up that confusion around there because people start out with some of that budget's conscious think they're kind of a way to get around the system like there's there's some things you do have to look at and buy on there so that you have it's probably sometimes better to go ahead and spend the extra money buy the 10 gig switch and it's just gonna work better for you and one of the really popular ones actually the one i'm using in my computer is the asus makes a uh 10 gig pcie card for desktops that's rj45 it's like 89 i think it's not too expensive and i've used it for a long time it's the most frequent question i've reviewed it before people say well doesn't overheat and i'm like i've never had a problem with it i don't know if it was an earlier model design mine doesn't get hot so it's been working perfectly fine for me so i i still think that card's a good purchase here in 2021 and i've had it for a couple years now so i'm not sure but i know there was like if you read the amazon reviews people talked about it overheating i don't know maybe i have just better air circulation it's not been an issue for me oh i will address a tuning issue if you want to set the mtu to a non-default setting read the details of every device that's in between to be able to get that to work properly we have helped a lot of people troubleshoot all the problems they created with mtus especially um with equipment that has nuances in the documentation like oh you don't set an mtu 9000 you had it you set it 9012 because this model requires 12 extra bits that it carries over um you it's kind of that's kind of a fine-tuning thing i don't know that it's as necessary to uh do that i mean if you're if you're uh someone who wants to tweak the absolute most speed on your storage network and want to adjust that mtu to a larger trunk size those larger mtus don't translate though to any faster internet speeds because they have to be chunked back down at some point to be able to get out to the internet so really think about your use case for it maybe only do it on your storage network but please note every device you add on there you also have to add and we've had people where they have half devices working and half of them have a lot of weird issues that's because the other ones they didn't implement properly the mtu 9000 every device has to match on that segment or it may not work properly and create some very unexpected problems so think before you do that it's not terrible to do it but plan it accordingly is what i should say so you can save yourself a lot of trouble googling things on stack exchange yeah planning is definitely an important thing i know home lab is exciting you want to get it going right now you know i've often felt that way too but every time i bought something without planning it i've always regretted it every single time and i think i'm so stubborn i had to learn that lesson probably more times than anyone else but um you know just just research take your time and i think it'll all work out yep now i will mention because we covered this all the way back in was it episode three i think yeah episode three that's where we talked about the uh networking and firewalls uh something i've reviewed since in between that episode and this one is uh the tp link equipment i would say for home lab uh from all my testing the last few weeks with tp link um overall i think it i i feel comfortable not over time because it's only been a few weeks but it seems to be a pretty good budget-friendly and reasonable thing to install in your home lab i bring that up because they make a lot of switches that are easy to manage with their software-defined networking and they're they they so far i mean granted i've only run it for a few weeks but i got a lot of feedback from people that said they've been running the tp-link equipment for longer and it does seem to make a budget-friendly home lab switch equipment and easy to manage at the same time that's kind of a good thing they copied definitely copied off the unified man it's i've made as many jokes as i can on on twitter about it because boy it looks a whole lot like the unify in every way but that made it easy for those you that have already know the unify system if you want to look at that one you'll be in very familiar territory yep i i've used pplink in the past so i've never had any problems it's been a very long time so i haven't seen any of their newer offerings but the ones that i did use several years ago they were fine i didn't have any problems so um i think it's probably a good thing to consider yeah so they're definitely um another another one i will add to there so if you're looking for some of the physical layer switches i i definitely because i think that was the common question we had in episode three was people kept throwing in the in there going what about tv link what i'm like i haven't reviewed it at that time so yep yeah yep and there seems to be a natural order of evolution of a home lab for a lot of people unless you just happen to have fallen into a bunch of money you don't know what to do with it so you decide to buy home lab stuff then great you could just go right to the enterprise equipment but for me you know it's kind of started with a spare desktop computer that i added another network card to and then i made that into a router which was a fun project and then um tom mentioned for about a year about pf sense and i'm like fine i'll try it out actually as your penguicon talk that yeah consider it and i installed it i'm like wow i like this a lot so then i'm running pf sense and then later on i buy a pfsense device but then i get to the point where okay i'd really like to do vlans but my switch doesn't support that so i found on ebay some thing that supported vlans it was a horrible interface but whatever i got it working and then i bought wireless access points that support vlans and you know about that stuff used and then over time just keep upgrading and then next thing you know i have unify i have like you know proper pfsense devices i think you start with using what you have and you keep building on that and sometimes that'll go a long way too yes now one thing of note this is um a frequent thing and you know we do some consulting for people who want to hire us for home lab consulting too and we constantly have to remind them when they start having vlan issues like how many switches do you have so she wouldn't have a mixed environment like jay said you bought this one or bought that one you have to have switches that support vlans in order for the vlans to work what i mean by that is there's sometimes the assumption made if i have a switch that supports vlan let's say like a unifi or a tp-link switch and you create those vlans but then you have this little five port switch that you stuck in between and that's some unmanaged five port and then you connect it to another switch that supports vlans or you plug in your wi-fi unit to it it is there's an extra packet there's extra pieces of the way that's transmitted for the vlan it's part of the tcp stack is is within there you look it all in and you're like okay the way this is transmitted the way it is transmitted through the switch does have the extra information in there if it is not part of it or it is tripped off because this that particular switch does not support it it will strip off those bits that are needed for the vlans and the tags will not forward to the next switch we actually have dealt with this in the enterprise environment quite a bit where we found hidden switches in ceilings because someone had an idea and we couldn't figure out why the vlans weren't going to where they would or we had the mystery of all these different computers showing up on one switchport we're like i don't understand how four computers can have one switchboard i'm like wait a minute there's another switch we don't know where it leaves the wiring room and we we would find him we had a school that it took us it took us a long time to finally get all the switches that were behind us that were pushed against walls ceiling mounted switches and things like that you'd sometimes you could find the court they went power cords in the ceiling so we couldn't see where they were plugged in yeah and i've had similar experiences that i've run into i i think the logical question at this point is why should i have vlans what's the benefit and is it something i should do i think there's probably a certain subset of the audience that are probably thinking that right now like this is something they should do or not and i can kind of give you some of my reasons for doing vlans the first reason was not practical at all i just wanted to learn vlans i just wanted to vlan all the things so i can learn it that's how i do everything i didn't even have a use case for it to admit to uh first is just i want to do vlans i want to learn it so i think a lot of people doing home lab they do things for no other reason then they just want to learn the things so they'll implement the thing but then after i implemented it i saw a lot of different um really good use cases for it so i mean this bit me the other day but one example is i have a vlan that's my internet of things vlan and i i i just don't want those devices to just have free rain to talk to any other device on my in my home lab i just want them to get to the internet that's it in edge case there is my home assistant i need to access that to manage my internet of things so i could allow that one that one device to talk to other devices via firewall rules but everything else on that vlan network can only get to the internet and then i also put a bandwidth cap on there too because i don't want anything on the internet of things you know thing to just saturate my entire internet connection or anything um now of course you have to remember what you've implemented because i'm like why is my home assistant so slow and my cameras are slow and i'm like oh yeah i put on a bandwidth limit and since then i've implemented two more cameras so the bandwidth requirements went up and i took me a week to remember that that aside um that's one use use case for sorry allergies but that's one use case for um for that is just kind of to segregate things i think that's a very um a good reason for that another one is sync thing for me personally when i set up a new computer and yeah in sync thing itself you can set some limits there but i i just didn't want anything on my you know devices network which is just laptops and desktops other than things that are wired in so we're talking wireless to all of a sudden saturate everything because i you know created a new laptop installation and now it's pulling down 300 gigs of data no one else in the network can download anything because you know it's just completely saturated it so i could put a bandwidth limit on my wi-fi that's like 100 megs or something like that my desktop is wired in so if i need to transfer a large video file when i do a recording there's no limitation there but it can prevent the wi-fi equipment from getting saturated or my kids are on their own vlan so if they're playing an online game you know i have like i want to say 50 megabits or something limited there so if they reformat their computer and download all their steam games again um yeah they'll wait a little bit longer because i have a business network that really needs that bandwidth so you could segregate things however it makes sense for you obviously if you are just one person in an apartment you probably don't have as much of a use case especially if you're not using iot but um i think each listener has his or her own reason for um considering vlans and it's not more or less uh what vlans can do for you what can you do with vlans right because you have come up some clever ideas of how to segregate things and one thing that i did recently was i really hated the fact that my smart tv was showing ads and i wanted to disable its ability to um show ads so i figured i was going to just disconnect it from the network and just make it a dumb box but then i want home assistant to be able to reach it so i can automate turning it on or off with with all the other things so um and i didn't think of this i think it was a listener that mentioned this like yeah just put a firewall rule where it blocks the internet like why didn't i think of that that's what i always do but now i have a smart tv that i can reach on the lan but the smart tv itself has no ability to go out and download things that i don't want it to download especially considering that my streaming media device is not that i use a roku so i segregate that too so there's all kinds of clever things that you could do with uh vlan so just think about what are some of the pain points on your network and is there any way that you that vlans might work for you and it's possible it could be a solution yeah the the nice thing about it too is b you're able to run one cable from one location to the other and then split it all off or give the option when you have the switch program that way you know your firewall feeds the switch and then you can trunk each port to only be the output of that one particular network and it just makes it really convenient and this is where companies and like i said it was copied by really well copied by the folks at tp-link but unifi popularized a really simplistic interface because i'm going to say compared to some of the enterprise equipment unified did a nice job of making vlans easier i would say and more accessible without having to learn the command line because if you started out with cisco some of the cisco people don't like it because it's like oh it shouldn't be this easy and they're not using the terminology the same and cisco does not have the easiest way and like jay mentioned before a lot of the other switches across brands there's not an absolute consistent way they present either a web interface or a command line interface cisco has their way of doing it it's a little bit different if you're using some of the hp pro curve it's a little bit different again if you're using some of the vios or brocade or you insert all these different options uh first out there so but once you kind of get it all consolidated boys it makes your life a lot easier now of note you are sharing a medium so if i have a one gig connection all those vlans are encapsulated within that physical one gig cable but that means no one particular network device can have more than one gig uh in two devices even if they're on separate vlans they are also limited back to that so it's just a little bit of a design consideration sometimes you may refer to it as the backhaul when we're designing enterprise networks for companies for example we built a warehouse for a client they have a shipping department way far away at the front or the back of the building from the front so we have a 10 gig pipe that trunks all the vlans down there because they have cameras they have separate devices that are all in the shipping warehouse and the computers need to be on one network the camera's on another and they have a couple other different devices that have to be on different networks so you trunk a whole 10 gig pipe down there and then we split it all up we only had to run one fiber line to go from point a to point b and encapsulate all of it so there's is it's something else to throw into your design consideration when you're building these yeah absolutely those are some very good points and you brought up naming you know how they don't like the the naming inconsistencies but that's going to happen um this is so hilarious it might well it is in my opinion anyway i go to my local store to buy a network cable because i'm doing um right now a 10 node raspberry pi cluster video and it's going to power over ethernet but i was missing one cable and i didn't have one so i have to go to store and buy one like anyone else and i bet you'd think that on the box it says ethernet cable or or something like that no it's called a streaming media cable that's what's on the package of this ethernet cable it's a streaming media cable and i'm like you can't possibly dumb it down anymore than that like um i laughed about it but it makes sense because the average person is probably going to use it for that it's an ethernet cable it's a it's a cat 5e cable um but it's like really like that's what it's come down to we call these streaming media cables now oh my gosh it's just going to keep going from here i bet it's just hilarious framing media cable yeah they will name all kinds of different things i think we covered all the physical layer topics here as much as we can is there anything else we have to add i think i'm down to the end of my list now yeah i think that's basically about it i mean more or less story you know you just start with what you have if you have a desktop in your closet and you can put another network card in there you know just try to see what you could do to make that a router um perhaps if you have some other equipment lying around you can use and then you can upgrade like tom said just make sure if you implement vlans you need vlans or the capability for vlans on every component in the chain just keep that in mind make logical decisions um just research well don't just impulsively buy anything uh buy good cables not you know the 30 roll of cables from the corner or you know just buy some good cabling and i think with that alone you'll be in great shape because that's gonna get you going yeah and as i said i will make sure i leave a lot of links uh in the show notes we're gonna start doing that it was a suggestion thank you for all of you um those are things that we're always working to improve this podcast uh and listening to all your feedback has been great but i'll make sure to show notes on this because well i talked about a lot of things i wanna make sure i have all the links so you can just go find them instead of trying to pause the podcast to figure out what i said um and me and jay have some other plans we're going to start adding some q a sessions so stay tuned subscribe we this isn't officially a podcast now that uh is linked to the homelab.show where you can download this and wherever good podcasts are consumed whatever app makes you happy we've got them listed everywhere now and a website so if you don't have an app you just want to download directly you can i know a lot of you did because we got a bandwidth warning i was that was that's like a sign of success that's when you get a bandwidth warning like everyone else no no we got a balance warning really yeah yeah that's what i wanted it's mostly because when i created the web template uh on our for a hosting server i didn't give it enough bandwidth where i didn't predict the popularity of the show either way is i up to bandwidth so we don't have any more warnings yeah so i guess it's going well maybe i should um cancel my plans of uh putting an ad on a billboard on i-75 and it's great then i think we're probably yeah we don't apparently don't need a billboard so thank you all very much for joining us today and uh like i said uh look for us we're trying to keep this as regular as possible life life happens but we're trying to keep this weekly um we will be getting to some projects both of us have lots of projects you can look at on our each of our channels lawrence systems.com for me and learnlinux.tv4j definitely um we we've definitely dove deeper into some of these topics uh hopefully this was helpful and look to see and look to hearing from some of you on the live stream and feedback from the next episode all right thanks thank you

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 41,993

Keywords: lawrencesystems

Id: PDET7LAqd9w

Length: 65min 8sec (3908 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021