It is indeed a ridiculous resolution of 3840x2160 Me old eyes need the fine detail.
I can recommend the Cisco 1921 router a good router for CCNA and in general.
Cool setup. Is that cooling fan pushing in air or pulling out? How often do you have to clean out dust?
Same here, but it’s challenging figuring out where to start/what router, for example. There are soo many options regardless of budget.
I did… thats what lead me to your contact page haha. Even though its about 6 months old (the blog post) is it still relevant? Anything needing updating or?
If you have AT&T Fiber internet, you cannot replace their hardware but check out this:
You can set up pass-through, this way you can use your own router/firewall setup.
Hi @adam What type of internet connection do you have from your ISP? Fiber, cable, DSL, wireless?
The fiber gods have blessed me with Fiber but most everything is wifi around my home. Planning on running cats to the offices
Pulling air out - no much dust as it’s in a closet. Not no dust, but very minimal :-).
I’m going to need AT&T to upgrade me to a newer router :-p
I can recommend the Beelink S12 Pro Mini PC. Made by https://www.bee-link.com/
A post was split to a new topic: Tree fell on my internet
After running it for 3 years, I’ve found a buyer for my Peplink Balance 20x. As such, I will be replacing it shortly with a firewall device. Stay tuned!
This is an inspirational setup and I’m half-ass using it as my own guide for slowly setting up a home lab. (I nearly have a home lab already, but it’s sprinkled through out my house and a bit of a mess really)
Just bought a rack and switch panel, will go further once I’ve keystoned the needed rooms throughout my house.
But a question for you if i may - and i apologise if this is a noob question!
I note your patch-panel is the only item going into your switches (as far as i can tell!). How are your x2 servers (and other bits) being connected into your network? Have you keystoned them into the patchpanel directly or something?
Cheers!
p-house
No such thing as noob questions here @p-house Because we are ALL noobs!
So here’s the setup which applies to almost all other home rack setups. Your ISP connection (modem) connects to your router (or ISP router if not replaced) many routers have more than 1 LAN port. Mine also has multiple, both of the servers in the rack are connected via the ports in the router.
Both in the original build (EdgeRouter 10x) and the latest update as of that article (the Peplink Balance 20x). I needed more ports, however, for things like Unifi APs, other rooms, and so the PoE EdgeSwitch 10XP has been powering that for the past 5 years.
The cables that you see Velcroed together below the rack are a combination of power cables (in) and LAN cables, which all are terminated using a patch panel. (I linked to it in the article.)
I have not upgraded the patch panel because nothing outside my office supports more than 1G LAN connections. But in the coming years I would switch to something like this with 10G Cat6 RJ45 Keystone Jacks.
However, like the article states. When I started out, I just wanted to replace the ISP modem-router combo. That usually how it starts and the over the years you keep improving upon that.
Edit:
June 10th 2025 recent photos of homelab…