Show us your physical setup!

Lounge
#1

As a change from my usual whinging, I thought that I would start a thread to discuss the physical setup that we have for our homes.

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Starting from the top left, we have the ZWave ZOOZ S2 Stick 700 and Sonoff Zigbee Dongle Plus mounted on small brackets made from light duty shelf brackets bent in my press brake with the USB extension cables taped to them. Simple but effective and gets everything well away from the noise of the rest of the equipment.

Heading over to the cupboard, we have a small UPS that can run the entire setup for about half an hour or so and a desktop rack with my network equipment on it. From the top there is a 48 port Unifi switch with the core resting on top of it, cable management, main patch panel from the rest of my house and then a 24 port Unifi PoE switch that powers the indoor and outdoor Wifi Access Points around my house (I have full coverage inside my two storey house, and outside across my 2700 square metre property). Also visible is a large PC fan that I use to pull air through the rack sourced through the air filter on the door (yes, I need to seal the lower shelf better). The fan is connected to a Wifi smart switch so that I can keep the noise down when the cupboard is cool.

On the bottom shelf, from the left we have a 7 bay Thecus NAS with about 7 Tb of drives. This device also runs my secondary DNS server. To the right of this there is a small HP Microserver which is running Windows Server and hosts my Active Directory, primary DNS, Unifi controller and other services. On the far right you can just see the Unifi Gateway which provides primary firewall and VLAN control as well as managing redundant Internet connections (FTTC NBN and a Ubiquiti Airmax link to a neighbour).

Not the fanciest or cleanest setup in the world, but does the job in my modest home network.

What are you doing with your home setup?

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#2

I’ve been getting things ready for some recovery time. I finally figured out a good use for some old devices.
And I put all my stuff in a 6U wall hung rack. It’s better than the shelf that I had. Once I get the rest of my cabling and such, It’ll be perfect.
Repurposed devices.

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New wall mount. Still a work in progress, but I can see what’s happening just with the screen there. Waiting on cable management. That always takes the longest.
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How do you have yout stuff set up?

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#3

Did we post our threads at basically the same time? Maybe we should merge them together?

1 Like
#4

So many questions:

  • I see a Unifi Dream Machine Pro, but where is your main ethernet switch?
  • What are the black and blue boxes on the wall to the left of the CORE?
  • What is the Nvidia Shield TV attached to and what is it doing in a cupboard?
  • Is the Synology NAS just doing NAS duties or do you have other containers running on it?
  • What is the monitor attached to? The Reolink security system?
1 Like
#5

I have fiber that comes in on the other side of the room. That feeds directly over to my UDMP, which connects to a USW-lite-16-PoE.

The blue box is a single gang box for a smart switch on the other side of the wall. This is an unfinished wall in the center of our home located under our basement steps. Perfect for networking.
The black box is the power to the REOLink NVR. Bulky thing to say the least.

Exactly on the other side of the wall is a 65" TV that doesn’t have any electronics visible. Which is why that beautiful green light will never been seen by un-prying eyes.
(As I glance over at it, I see that the IR controller and power has fallen below the tv again.)

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The 32TB Synology NAS houses my modest collection of media, runs pihole, a few testing environments and storage.

The monitor is attached to the REOLink, and two CORE environments at the moment. It’s connected to a 5 port hdmi switch. There will also be three computers joining that mix. One linux, two windows. They’re for testing and they have some obsolete software installed on them that I can no longer obtain. One serves Plex.

It’s a work in progress. The rack only arrived yesterday. I’ll post an updated photo once everything is in place. still a bit pieced together.

3 Likes
#6

Now I need like I need to go to the local hardware store and finally start to build the wall mount I have wanted to build for at least 2-3 years… :slight_smile: Finally I can tame the cable-mess in my Living Room…

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#7

Or one can use the same tactics as I… spread out everything within your home. Like hiding the stuff inside cupboards, closets and desks! :rofl:

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#8

That feels like cheating… but somehow appealing… :slight_smile:

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#9

You’d be amazed how much equipment you can hide behind a flat screen tv on a full motion mount :see_no_evil:

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#10

I just finished migrating all of my stuff from an adhoc mess to a more contained rack. Wasn’t easy (or cheap) but in the end worth it. The goal was to keep it clean and yet easily servicable. For example, the server is on a slide out shelf so I can easily service it as needed.

It’s the brains to my smart house. From top:

  • UDM and various hubs that I rest on top for better signal
  • monitor, but behind it I hide things like my ups and cable modem and a few other hubs/bridges
  • space left intentially for a future UDM Pro
  • patch panel
  • unify switch
  • keyboard/mouse shelf
  • power distribution (also have on in the back)
  • drawer for storing things like my backup hard drives
  • main server, runs unraid with a bunch of dockers and a couple VM’s
  • drive enclosures
  • backup server (holds a copy of my main data as well as weekly/nightly backups of all my machines)
  • speaker, hooked up via an airport express for airplay2 when i’m down there.

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#11

Looks so clean compared to my cleaning closet setup :grin:

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#12

Industrial look… I like it! :wink:

Nice touch having speakers in the rack as well, means that you’re spending some time tweaking your stuff as well! :grin:

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#13

The wife took one look at it and thought it was so much cleaner. She didn’t even ask how much it cost. So thats a win.

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#14

That sits in the basement. So we are always down there doing something. Might as well through in an airplay speaker there as well. It just sits on the bottom shelf.

Right now I’m holding back on the tweaking. I wanted to add in a jbod drive enclosure and replace the two I have with something rack mounted… but just want to let it settle for a bit before touching it again. I also have other projects I’m working on.

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#15

Is that creating a new podcast episode about CORE?? :rofl:

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#16

Here’s my mess, maybe one day it’ll get cable managed properly. Work in progress as I recently started wiring more of the house, thinking about a small wall mount rack and some patch panels to hide the hole in the wall.

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Starting at the top, I’ve got my CORE, hue & lutron bridges, USB extensions hastily stapled to the wall for zwave & ZigBee dongles :sweat_smile:

24 port Tplink omada switch as the core of the network, will be adding another eventually for POE

NUC running my backup DHCP, DNS, and AD server

An old APC 2200va UPS powering everything

Dell R710 - Xeon L5630, 12GB ram. Running pfsense as my router (overkill, needs to be downsized)

Dell R320 not currently in use, was a backup VM server, possible replacement for the above pfsense box

Dell R720 - 2x Xeon E5-2690s, 128gb of ram, 6 16tb drives, a pair of SSDs for boot, and a pair of 1.6tb PCIe NVMe drives for VM storage. Runs proxmox, hosts several VMs & containers, connected to the main switch with 10gig. I call it Thanos, because it eliminated the next 2 servers below it, and one more that’s no longer in the rack.

Below that is my old storage array, 48 2tb drives in a pair of supermicro chassis that I ran under freenas, until it no longer made sense to feed them electricity

Oh, and the poor HE c4 hanging on for dear life off the side of the rack, knowing it’s days are numbered

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#17

I keep changing things so much that I don’t even bother trying to organize anymore… :man_shrugging:

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