Home lab 2020 networking

A lot has happened in the past year. Most importantly, I moved to a new house! And with a new house, there also must be a new home lab :-)

In this series of blog posts, I will show my home lab configuration, starting with the networking part.

I am a big fan of Ubiquiti networking hardware. Using it for a few years now, moving to a new home means replacing the old Security Gateway Pro for the new Dream Machine Pro (UDM). Besides acting as an appliance to store the footage of my Unifi security camera's, another advantage of the UDM is having two 10Gbit ports.

Fiber connection

It took me almost five months to get a fiber connection. At first, our address does not exist according to the provider. Second, there was no fiber cable, although I send several emails with photo's there was. Third, the line was full. Long story short, after five months some Bulgarian people appeared at my door and installed my fiber connection.

Of course, I immediately removed the router from the provider, and the fiber cable is directly connected to the UDM. I have a 500Mbit business connection, but I am very happy about the speed :-)

Backbone

My home lab is located in the attic and the fiber connection on the ground level. Here I have the Unifi Dream Machine Pro and an Unifi 24 port PoE switch. The switch is a generation 2 PRO version, with also two 10Gb ports. On this switch, I have connected the security cameras and some wired home appliances. A cat7 !0Gb network cable connects to my home lab in the attic. Here I have an Unifi 16XG network switch with 16 10Gb ports on which my home lab servers are connected. Also connected is an Unifi 24 ports PRO switch to connect the 1Gb ports.

Augmented Reality

A really cool feature from the Unifi Network app is to view the connected devices, see the picture below.