A friend of mine from church came to me with the desire to have his new house have a great network. His family was having a house built which meant that we had a fresh canvas to work with.
So the first advice I gave him was to have the builder wire all the rooms he may possibly want to connect to a network in the future and also include overhead wires in boxes for access points and future camera locations. These wires need to go to a common location.
Those locations included all the bedrooms, behind planned TV locations, the gameroom, office, back porch, etc...
Well, that more or less happened. On the plus side, all the desired wiring got routed and made its way to a "common location". Sadly, the builder yielded the usual useless 3 inch deep wall box. This box is intended for simple telephone and cable TV distribution - not a full blown Ethernet network! And worse, their idea of a "common location" is a child's upstairs bedroom closet. Oh yeah, that's a great idea!
In this box, you will note several things.
- There are (15) BLUE Cat-6 Ethernet data lines.
- There are (6) RED Ethernet camera lines
- There are also (6) BLACK useless analog camera lines
In addition
- There are about (12) WHITE Cat-5 Ethernet lines being plugged into a splitter box presumably for old fashion POTS telephones
- About (10) BLACK & WHITE coaxial lines for TV plugged into a splitter that is just hanging there as well as those white coaxial lines on the left that are not terminated.
WHAT A MESS !!
So my plan was to pull as much of those lines out of this box and instead route it to a shelf area on the wall above this box. There I would organize a small 19 inch rack and some network components.
Above is the cleaned out box. All of the Ethernet lines that were relevant have been removed. The coaxial splitter/amplifier was secured to the box, and its power brick was now plugged into the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) so the cable modem input would remain on if the power went out.
This closet can now be closed, locked and ignored in this closet location.
Seen above is a small 19 inch rack chosen to fit in the shelf space above the cleaned out box in the closet. Out of the view of this photo is the cable modem and the UPS.
All of those BLUE Cat-6 lines and some of those Cat-5 lines
are connected to the back of the patch panel.
are connected to the back of the patch panel.
Items shown are as follows:
The switch shown is a Ubiquiti Unifi 24-port 250W POE+
The gateway and firewall that links the cable modem to the home network is a Ubiquiti Unifi USG
The Ubiquiti CloudKey G2+ is both a network controller and will serve as an video recorder for the future cameras.
The Access Points that were chosen:
Ubiquiti Unifi NanoHD for inside the house
Ubiquiti Unifi AP-PRO for outside porch
In the future, the cameras will come from the Ubiquiti family such as the G3-Pro or -Dome
The network is working great, my friends family is happy, and the system has room to grow!
My friend or I can monitor the network controller from anywhere using the free software apps from Ubiquiti. And when software needs updating, I can do that remotely as well!
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