My home networking equipment has grown over time with all sorts of new stuff, spread across a few locations.
We connected to the NBN a few months ago and there were a few changes to how I had everything set up. What used to be our study is now our middle child’s bedroom, so the copper line coming into the house is under her bed.
I had an ethernet port put into this room years ago to connect to a switch at the top of the pantry next to the house alarm. This was also where all cables came back to for our IP Camera setup. Good in theory but not so good in practice.
With a switch and cables at the top of the pantry, every time something was moved around up there (think sandwich toaster, medicine box etc…) inevitably a cable or two would dislodge be it ethernet or worse, power.
So a while ago I moved most of this to the garage on top of an old fridge. This was a better location as could have everything coming to 1 place (and it is only a 2m (other side of a wall really) from where most of equipment already was.
The problem was still that it was a rat’s nest. Cables, power boards, switches, routers, wireless APs all over the place and some not even plugged into anything.
I decided I needed a better setup than this so set out to build a network rack. I slowly bought the pieces I needed and assembled them. The last piece came last week, which was the rack itself.
I got a 6RU wall mountable network rack. I mostly have small items that needed to go into it. A Mac Mini to run the IP cameras, a router (Ubiquiti USG), a 24 port switch, an 8 port POE switch, a 6 outlet PDU and a couple of other small items.
I still need to patch the cameras into the back of the patch panel to make things neater and more organised, but so far this is a great improvement over the mess that was there before.
The next step is to get the NBN/phone line patched into the cabinet and move the modem from under the bed into the cabinet.