Question

Just bought a new house and am looking for what your tech rack looks like. I have a mounting board on the basement wall with coax and cat6 runs central to there. Unfortunately it’s not centrally located, so I may end up having to do a mesh to get the whole house covered. Or run another line and put just the router center do the house. I want to have the following and am open to advice on any of these. Battery back up UPS for the entire home network system. Able to run the home network for a couple hours. DSL. My modem. SmartThings 2nd gen probably. Gigabit switch. 12 port I think. Self monitoring home security. So it’ll take a hub of some sort. I have a couple Pis sitting around not doing anything, they could be put to use at some point too. So help me out. What kind of rack, mounting method, or shelving do you use for your central location?  

Answer 1

Can you post of picture of the wall. Secondly Mesh networks are here to stay, so wherever your network general calls home is truly not a huge deal. Do you have other Cat 6 drops at other locations in the home? What type of networking needs will you have? Number of hard wired clients? Do you want to go wireless on security or do you have drops at camera locations? Good number of variables.  

Comments

@kutaisi I’ll have to snap a photo of the wall next time I’m there. It’s just a 2 foot square particle board panel fastened to poured block wall in the basement. Middle of the wall, about 4 foot high. Lots of room to do whatever I want. No wired cameras. No way to run. I get mesh, the house just isn’t that big to need it. A central router will cover everything well. Have cat6 run into each bedroom, kitchen, both living rooms, and garage. Smurf tube to the outside also. Hard wired will be limited. Just my work laptop in my office. Most everything else I’d be using CAN be wireless if I can’t get network cable to it.  

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Well that's the one nice thing about Mesh Networking you still get LAN breakouts at the AP's. If you mount the Router in the basement you can feed a switch for all the other drops but will always fail victim to the wifi performance originating from the basement. With even a two point Mesh system. You can install one Router/AP in basement, feed the switch and then in living room or next central location add the next AP and you can feed Wifi to the home plus feed whatever you intended to add at that drop location. Mesh is super inexpensive these days so no real extra expense. You literally need a small 4U rack. Mounted switch and UPS in rack and a shelf for the Router and DSL modem. Done.  

Answer 2

Something to consider is power line networking where you need a drop and can’t get it there. I used that extensively in my old condo and found it to be far more stable/reliable than wireless.