Home Datacenter: The Network

As i renovate the house i bought with my wife, i took profit to pull ethernet Cat. 7 cable on every room …

Right now, i have:

• 2 * 4 plugs on the living room.
• 2 plugs per bedroom
• 1 in the entrance
• 1 in the workshop under the house

Every ethernet line come to the technical closet where is also located the electrical board.

To connect all that line, i ordered:

• An old HP Pro Curve 4910 (gigabit, manageable) for about 40€ on eBay.
• A 24 ports patch panel on Amazon (~50€)
• A 4U, wall-mount, rack, still on Amazon (~50€)
• A 19″ power bar, again on Amazon (~25€)

Here is an overview of the assembled elements:

And here is the final setup, running on the closet:

For the curious, the small device on top of the switch is a RIPE Atlas Probe basically, a Arm SBC.

Next steps are:

• Partition the network in VLANs:
  • One VLAN for the end user device (computer, phones).
  • One VLAN for “smart” objets (TV, Playstation, IPTV receiver, …)
  • One VLAN for the hosted services (this topic will be covered later ;-))
  • One VLAN for the DMS.
• Replace my FAI router with a home made one. My choice fell to FriendlyElec Nano PI R2S : a powerfull ARM board with 2 Gigabit ethernet ports (one native, one using USB3).
• Get a home made small NAS. One more time, i choose a FriendlyElec board: the Nano PI M4B … but this topic will have its dedicated article!

Thanks to this small, economic (at least, at buy time … i must keep an eye on power consumption of the HP Pro Curve), i can now use my home connection at its full speed:

Compared to Wifi, it’s unbeatable …