As my blog-style articles often generate a lot of interest and there are a lot of network nerds in our forum, I decided to take you on my little journey from 8-port switch to 19″ network cabinet. While Igor reported live from Taiwan on the occasion of the Computex trade fair and has to gather his thoughts after the fair, I’ll show you a few pictures from my basement and how my “Homelab” has developed over the last few months. Yes, the last part of my basement extension will also be presented at some point. I haven’t forgotten about it, I’ve just put the focus on other areas for the time being.
One of these areas, for example, was our small home network, which had been limited to a 10″ patch panel and an 8-port gigabit switch since we moved into this house and finished the basement. I’m sure you remember how proud I was of my first own patch panel back then and I’m sure everyone knows the saying “Nothing lasts as long as a makeshift solution”. As a result, the patch panel simply dangled lovelessly from the incoming network cables and the small switch quickly became too small – but more on that in a moment.
In this multi-part “blog”, I would like to take you on my journey of how I turned the makeshift existing installation into a neat little “home lab” with minimal financial outlay, which makes the nerd’s heart beat faster. In the first part, I will show you the initial situation, the assembly of the network cabinet and the installation of the network technology. The second part shows the installation of my small home server, including the installation of the operating system and some scenarios and use cases that may also be of interest to some readers. Whether and how the other parts are split will depend on the interest of the readers.
Initial situation
Let’s remember: It all started with the expansion of my office. I had laid all the network cables on a small 10″ patch panel, a very careless and makeshift setup. The switch simply dangled from the patch cables, the router was clamped behind the earthing cable, I hardly dare show it here!
Devices were added here and there, TV, NAS, access point and before you know it, the 8-port switch has become too small.
With the almost forgotten dream in mind of running my own network cabinet at some point, I looked around for a 19″ switch just for fun and was amazed at how cheaply discarded “enterprise” devices are offered on the second-hand market. You can get a 24-port Gbit switch with all kinds of functions for a good €20, so I didn’t have to think twice and went straight for it. Not necessarily a mistake, but in some ways a dead end – I’ll come to that later.
Thanks to plenty of ports, all devices could now be connected to the network at the same time and playing around with VLANs and other functions of the HP switch immediately whetted my appetite for more. Especially as this was still not a “respectable” solution:
77 Antworten
Kommentar
Lade neue Kommentare
Urgestein
Urgestein
Urgestein
Mitglied
Veteran
Moderator
Urgestein
Mitglied
Veteran
Urgestein
Veteran
Urgestein
Mitglied
Urgestein
Veteran
Veteran
Urgestein
Urgestein
Urgestein
Alle Kommentare lesen unter igor´sLAB Community →