Yes, here comes the tale of the inevitable, the essential, and long awaited upgrade of our home network to relative industry standard.

After many years, and unceremonious additions of a gigabit switch and router, I’ve finally gathered the needed ingredients for a substantial upgrade across the majority of the network.  Now, I didn’t get stupid about it by sticking in 10GBE switches and the like, but rather I cast an eye towards future proofing the setup for the next ten years or so.

The first on the list was an upgrade to my current NAS, a Synology DS212+, which had served me well (pun intended) for a decade.  It began life here with 2TB drives, which soon filled up and were replaced with 2 – 6TB drives.  These were installed without protection as JBOD (just a bunch of discs), were approaching capacity, and beginning to throw minor errors in their health check, so I knew time was running out.  Also, as I learned, I had begun to call on it for much more over the year (eg. this site) and while the DS212+ was great for serving video, it was only ‘able’ to do everything else.

At first this was replaced with a used Synology RS816 I found on Kijiji for $600.  It came populated with 2TB drives and, never knowing the future, I jumped on it.  It gave me a discounted upgrade, and the opportuninty to get familiar with the process of migration.  As I was working fulltime, it took some time to get  to a point where I was familiar with the steps required.  Persistence paid, our videos were transferred over, and the various TV boxes were pointed to the new NAS.  This was a definite upgrade – blazing in comparison – yet mere punctuation in the bigger scheme of things.

Deserving a mention, prior to this was the repalcement of our router with a Synology RT2600ac.  It offered a whole realm of functionality not usually found on retail routers, and replaced a failthful Cisco business router which was robust… but administering it was nearly impossible without a %&^ degree from Cisco.  As well, it was a 10/100 router (slow)… so it now sits in a box downstairs, without regret.

The downside to the RT2600ac was there was no facility to add additional isolated networks to it (since been updated with new firmware).  Not being able to isolate IOT (internet of things) devices from your existing home network is an open invitation to ransomware.  Cheap devices from Google, Amazon, Apple – often offered for free wink wink – are notoriously insecure, and should never be allowed to exist on the same network as your personal devices.

Along came the Synology RT6600ax, and with it the option for multiple home networks, VLAN’s, port trunking, etc…  the list goes on and on.  Though I wasn’t plush with $$ at the time, I just had to have it, and one was in hand as soon as I could find one.  I’ve since gotten myself into trouble more than a few times with it, poking buttons and switches to the wails from the other half, but that is how I learn.  The orange light in the picture was me learning a lesson about terminating keystones, but I’ll get to that later.

It should be obvious by now that I’m a big Synology fan, but so what. Don’t care…  Synology is like the Apple of NAS’s… without the suck.  If you have any interest in migrating away from the surveillance state of Microsoft, Windoze, or anything whatsoever to do with Gurgle, Chrome, and their pervasive suite of spyware, you have entered into Synologys’ business model, but I digress…

To update the NAS, for some time I was pining for Synologys’ RS1619xs+, but sanity prevailed and I opted for the DS1621+ .  This is a 6 bay NAS, now populated with 10TB IronWolf drives in a RAID6 array.   It is capable of the entire suite of Synology apps, and that is just what I have in mind for it. 

There it sits behind the couch, plugged into whatever got it working while I gathered the rest, and though it is full of drives now, it didn’t start out that way.  At $500 a pop, hard drives were gathered two at a time, and it ran on two until I had the remaining four put together.  Adding those drives was an utter nightmare of my own stupidity, but I recovered without loss, and as I said earlier, this is how I learn things.  Don’t ever pull a drive from a running array until you are sure what the blinking lights indicate…

Not too long after that was in the house, I found a DS720+ on Kijiji for $300, and brought it home to run backups onto.  It didn’t come with drives, but I had a few 2TB drives around for it.  This model is no slouch, so grabbing one at that price, at only two years old, was sweet indeed.

So, those are the guts of the setup.  The RT6600ax connects the network, and the DS1621+ runs nightly backups to the DS720+.  Right…. now what?  The previous post about this detailed the current setup, which was functional, up out of sight, and solid, yet the various peices of it were strewn all over the house mostly due to the location of LAN plugins.  These were done as needed, when needed over the years with no mind to a future.

What I really wanted was a network rack to centralize everything, but a location for that was the sticker until my other half suggested the nook in the basement.    and the light went on.  While it was exposed to the world, it was perfect in so many other ways that it negated that aspect of it.  Besides, both the Synology boxes are rather quiet anyways, so noise wasn’t going to be a big problem.

I started gathering the items as I planned out an install process.  Most things came from Amazon, as much as I don’t like them, but you can’t argue with home delivery when they keep giving you Prime for free.  A StartTech 8U rack with two shelves for the NAS’s to sit on, a surge protector to plug everthing thing into, a patch panel to terminate the lines at, the keystones, rj45 jacks, boots and cat6 cable to fabricate LAN lines with, two NetGear 8 port POE  switches for IP cameras (coming), and finally a UPS to protect everything from power surges, lightning, and blackouts.

Piece by piece they arrived until I had enough to do an initial mock up, and began honing my skills making patch panel cables.  It’s tedious, but I made it comfortable.

It takes an particular set of tools to fabricate these, not the least of which are those yellow handled scissors designed specifically for the task.  A cable tester, crimper tool, cheater glasses to see what I was doing, and “all the things” were bought begrudingly over the years, but I’ve saved a ton of money having them on hand.

Soon enough I had a dozen, knowing I’d need a dozen more.  Most people would just buy a set, and maybe I should have done this, but I just had to see for myself what I could do.  The quality of LAN cabling has suffered with the supply chain difficulties, so all I could get my hands on was this cock-stiff stuff, so what can you do?  Once done, the lines weren’t very flexible.  I probably wouldn’t do it again.

The next move was to gain access to the small area behind the furnace where all the new lines were going to be pulled to.  This was done with a drywall knife and patience, preserving the cut-out for use later as an access door.

Behind here, aside from gaining access where before I simply couldn’t fit (and finding a gas drip leg that isn’t to code), was access to the furnace chase where there was ample room to string lines.  Ample means there was just enough room to stand but no more.  It took some time to actually give myself the go-ahead to cut that hole but, with no reason not to, I don’t regret it now.

Once that was done I added some backing behind the wall, hung the rack for the first time, and made some decisions on where I wanted to put power and the wall nose for all the lines.  A circuit had already been pulled to power what was, before, up in the ceiling, so I relocated this and pulled another outlet to the bottom left for the UPS.  The purpose of the plugin behing the rack is still unknown, but I’m sure a light, or something, will get plugged in there eventually.  What I know for sure is that a lack of outlets is always a problem, not the other way around.

My ISP’s modem, and the cable running to it, were also relocated at this time to keep the network up and running as I transitioned through what I affectionately called the “snakes on a plane” period of construction.

And so began the process of pulling in lines, room by room, settling them into a bundle in the chase, and terminating them into keystones at the patch panel.  You can just see the beginning of the service loop coming into shape at this point.

This picture gives a good idea of why I was trying to centralize everything.  What a mess of cables and wires!  –> “snakes on a plane” <–  Much of this has been moved now, with the goal for this room to be a lab of sorts.  Each room had its challenges, with the den being the biggest PITA of all.  That desk is monolithic and not easily moved, yet moved it was… time and again, as I learned how NOT to terminate keystones in the most awkward spot in the house.  By the end, I pulled four lines into the wall in that corner, with the root of my problems still undiscovered.  Here is a hint –> 

At this point, figuring out how this was all going to work was still coming into shape in my head.  I had to get the signal from the modem to the router, from the router to the patch panel, from the patch panel to the switch, and from the switch back out to all the rooms.  Yes… it sounds easy if you say it fast, but I tripped over it time and again in my head.

Line by line, all the overhead work I had done previously was pulled apart and moved and, as it happened ,I celebrated a little as I recalled all the frustrations dealing with it over the years.   It was as convenient as I could make it, given the space available, but working on it when needed was always an overhead “dust in your eye” PITA.

By now, surrendering to the process was over.  All trepidation was gone, and with the place all torn apart, and a vision in mind of what it would look like upon completion, I dug in and got comforable.

Here is the first running mock up.  I was having connectivity issues, and the brackets to mount the switch to the rack needed “Mikenizing” to mount it to the rack.

The connectivity issue was from manually punching down the lines into the keystone instead of using a punchdown tool.

This left the lines protruding the keystones just enough to touch each another when side by side in the patch panel.  When I thought this through, it all made sense.  The solution was to trim each line with a pair of flush cutters tight to the keystone.  After testing the first few I was confident I had found the problem and continued with the rest.  A problem with a solution is the best type to have.  Learn learn learn…

I clamped up some trim, and mounted it on the drywall cutout for the hole in the wall.  Easy peasy.

And here it is, in all it’s glory.  The patch cables are a little longer than I like, and I may buy some 6″ ones at a later date rather than fab them up myself.  Undecided here…

All together, the two NAS’s sit nicely on the lower shelf, and though it might look tight, there is adequate air flow.  The two POE switches have their power bricks behind them, and may stay there upon development or get moved to the right onto a shelf.  Again, undecided.  The UPS powers everything you see, so no more worrying about a huge investment during lightning storms or outages, and the surge bar (middle rack) has extra plugins on the front should they ever be needed, which is a nice touch.

I still have to install a few keystone wall plates around the house, but every line in that patch panel actually goes somewhere in the house or garage.   Aside from camera installations, which I won’t detail here, this is now future proofed for a decade or so according to my present needs.  Over the past decade, I have had ZERO problems with anything Synology (that wasn’t of my own making).  They are rock solid in my books, so I couldn’t be happier.

What remains is discovering what can be done with all the packages on the NAS I now have the time to explore.  Virtual machines, docker images, surveillance station, mail station, home automations with OpenHab or others, drive, calendar, PLEX or video station… the list just goes on and on.

Go ahead, shut down the internet.  I’m good for months.