House under construction, **AS WELL AS NETWORK!! Equipment and planning questions

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Thread: House under construction, **AS WELL AS NETWORK!! Equipment and planning questions

  1. #1
    Sushi
    Join Date
    Jan 2016
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    House under construction, **AS WELL AS NETWORK!! Equipment and planning questions

    Hello All,

    I've been lurking the forums for a while (trying) to better educating myself concerning cable types and cabling in general. All this has been in preparation of building my new home. I have some very general questions regarding equipment, connections, and direction to give whoever I end up brining in to configure my newly installed network.

    Before I begin PLEASE forgive my terminology. I'm sure I am murdering and making somebody cringe.

    To start a bit of information on the home and the current cabling:

    My home is around 2500 sq.ft., 4 bedrooms on the first level. Second floor consist of a bonus room and a walk in attic. I have opted for spray foam insulation through how the entire envelope of the home and a sealed attic with a lot of room (basically creating a conditioned attic space).

    I also have built a metal shop about 150' away from the home.

    I have installed CAT6 cable for the all of the following drops (all of which I consider Media
    -2 drops behind each TV for each room. (4 Bedrooms X 2 drops =============== 8 drops
    -2 drops behind the living room TV above a fireplace ====================== 2 drops
    -2 drops in built-in cabinets beside fireplace (which I will house all AV equipment) ==== 2 drops
    -2 drops behind TV outlets on back porch (1 on each side of porch) ============= 4 drops
    -2 drops behind TV outlet in bonus room ============================= 2 drops
    -4 drops ran underground to the metal shop============================4 drops
    -6 drops strategically placed around perimeter of home for IP cameras============ 6 drops

    So to recap I have a grand total of 24 CAT6 cables runs. I have all of these cables brought to central location in my attic where I plan to set up all of my network gear. This is where I need some serious advice.

    I have planned on buying a wall mountable rack like this:
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...=ATVPDKIKX0DER

    And a patch panel like this:
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...=ATVPDKIKX0DER

    My plan is to set up a computer based NVR for my security system and have it on its on network so it will not bog down my personal/media network.

    I want network storage housed in the attic. I picture a piece of equipment with multiple bays. I want to use a couple of drives for security, couple for home media, and a couple for my wife's business (wedding photographer). I want to have a separate network storage device in my metal shop that will back up my wife's drives every night. We need redundant back ups of her wedding pictures in case the house ever burns down.

    I plan to have smart TVs on the network that can access movies over the network stored on the drives upstairs.

    I need so much help, its ridiculous. I want to be able to have all my equipment together when I bring in a professinal and tell him how I want it set up. Which networks I want segmented etc..

    Any help would be much appreciated.

  2. #2
    Hammerhead Shark cat5e's Avatar
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    Make sure that you have a connection to wherever the ISP would put your Modem leading to the attic or wherever the Router would be.

    Almost every one needs Wireless in the Home (at least for Cell phone, Tablets, Laptop etc)

    Do not work under an assumption that you would put somewhere One Wireless Router and it would cover well the whole House.

    If you plan now (or in the future) to cover the space with available Wireless install drops to spot that a Wireless APs would be.

    Make sure that rack and the patch panel are size compatible.

    Make sure that the 150' outside stretch is protected from the element and install at the entry point to the houses an Arrester to protect the networks from lighting surges.

    http://www.amazon.com/Network-Signal.../dp/B00548AGOI

    Make sure that the attic would not get too hot from all the installed electronics.

    Otherwise, it looks pretty good.


    .
    Last edited by cat5e; 01-18-2016 at 08:41 PM.


    CAT5e
    Microsoft, MVP - Networking
    .

  3. #3
    Great White Shark vertices's Avatar
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    Palm Coast, FL
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    Looks pretty good. I would go with 2 Synology NAS units if you want that kind of setup, and have them mirror each other between your workshop and attic. I would put a Windows box in the attic (desktop or server) and connect it to the Synology with iSCSI. I would share out the NAS storage via the Windows box for wedding photos and other users. Then I would put Plex Media Server on that same box, and you could also put whatever software you need for your NVR system.

    Personally I would skip the 2nd NAS since it's possible you could lose the house and the shop 150' away, perhaps a theft while on vacation. I would instead put CrashPlan on the Plex Server.I would attach a 6TB USB drive to the Plex server and have CrashPlan backup the NAS to both the cloud and the USB simultaneously. This would give you fast local restores for general failures as well as a low cost cloud backup for catastrophes. If 6TB isn't enough for local, I would divide my data into different CrashPlan sets and have different sets going to different drives and hook up multiple drives to the Plex server.


    http://www.simplynas.com/synology-ds1815-8-bay.aspx
    http://crashplan.com
    http://plex.tv


    I also wouldn't bother with separate networks for NVR and such. If it was a business I would just VLAN it out and drop some QoS on it, but for a home it's not going to matter. With 1000mbps links, and your average high quality HD stream from a camera being under 5mbps tops, the NVR traffic just isn't going to affect anything. You'll never notice it. Even with 20 cameras, that's 10% of a single port.


    I would also go with a bigger rack (us guys always want a bigger rack!). http://www.amazon.com/Post-Open-Rack...ost+rack&psc=1

    Put it in a corner and put shelves in it. Can put a monitor, NAS, switches, APC, Plex server, etc. Put it all in there. Plenty of room for all equipment vertically and can add more later. If you put a big shelf at the bottom that sticks out the front and back, you can put an APC down there and a PC and it will balance the whole thing so you don't need to bolt the top to the wall with ladder rack, although you could do ladder to the wall if you wanted to bring your cables across and put the patch panel and switch in this rack. Shelf like this on the bottom: http://www.atekcommunications.com/network%20racks.jpg And optionally ladder like this to the wall: http://www.cyberxlink.com/Shared/ima...21090-3_02.jpg

    And like Cat5e said, get multiple APs. Ubiquity is a good low cost solution that is centrally controlled. https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ Could put the mgmt software for this on the Plex server as well. It's really nice to have a powerful Windows box as a general home server attached to a separate NAS via iSCSI for bulk storage.
    Last edited by vertices; 02-03-2016 at 03:26 PM.

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