It’s been a while since I’ve written about my home network, which I totally rebuilt after moving last year.
Here is my rack as it stands today:
I am all in on UniFi gear, as you can see from all the Apple-like aluminum hardware in that photo. From top to bottom, here is how things are set up:
- Cable Modem: My Comcast connection comes straight into this and is then passed to my network over a 2.5 GbE Ethernet connection.
- Dream Machine Special Edition: This is my gateway. In the UniFi world, this is what manages the entire network, including routing, the firewall, content filters, and more. The Dream Machine can be used to run Protect, UniFi’s home security and camera system, and even record footage with its built-in hard drive, but I have a standalone Protect box further down the stack, as when I initially built this out, I was not using a gateway with its own storage. The Dream Machine uses Comcast as its upstream Internet connection, but it can fail over to my backup ISP — a super-slow AT&T DSL connection. That green fiber optic cable runs to a workshop off my garage, where I have a secondary switch running two of my cameras and one wireless access point.
- A 24-port patch panel with a hodgepodge of keystones.
- My main switch is a Pro Max 24 PoE. Yes, its name is terrible and a rip-off of Apple’s terrible naming, but it’s a heck of a switch. I use its two SFP ports to connect it to the Dream Machine and to my NAS. It has a handful of 2.5 GbE ports that I use for connections at my desk and for my access points. The colors correspond to the connected device’s link speed, making it easy to see at a glance if something is acting up.
- Below the switch is my UNVR, or network video recorder. I have three cameras, and all their footage is stored locally on this device. This is overkill for just three cameras, but I already had it (and had opened it up to install quieter fans), so it is here to stay.
- The next two rack units are a bit deceiving. At the front of the rack is a mere placeholder, but at the back is Unifi’s Power Distribution Pro, which is basically a networked power strip. When paired with the UPS at the bottom of the rack, the Dream Machine can shut down network equipment individually if the power is out and the UPS is nearly depleted. I could do this with just the UPS, but it doesn’t have enough battery-backed outlets for the rest of the gear in the rack, so I run everything through the PDU Pro instead.
- That box full of hard drives is the UNAS Pro, UniFi’s older rack-mountable NAS product. It lacks some of the niceties of UniFi’s newer offerings (like the ability to use an SSD as a cache to speed up file access), but it works well enough for what I need. I should note that this is not something like a Synology that can run things like Docker containers. I just needed a bunch of storage on my network.
I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the rack itself is actually two Toolless Mini Racks stacked together. Had I known I would need so much space, I would not have taken this route, but I got a great deal on the second one, so I stayed the course.
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