Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The 8-Bit Guy. Now, back in 2013 I made
this quick little video called “A tour of my home network.”
This was back when I was still going by the name “The iBook Guy” and that was even
before I had my own logo. And at the time, I honestly didn’t think that many people
would be interested. However, it was a surprisingly popular video and it has now reached over
1.8 million views, which is more than I even have subscribers.
A lot of people have been asking if I would do an update, since that video is now 7 years
old. And so here it is. and I have some interesting surprises for you.
I’m going to start in my office room, which a lot of people think is the same as my studio
room, but it isn’t, it’s a totally different room. And behind that door is my network closet.
But, it didn’t always used to be here. In fact, if we go back about 20 years ago, my
network closet was in another part of the house and it looked like this. Yes, I was
really into Sun Sparcstations back then, as you can tell. In fact, at one point I had
a CD-ROM tower with 7 CDROM drives in it, and one of those was a burner. And that’s
primarily where I stored most of my files at the time. But as you can imagine, with
trying to store more and more digital video, that system eventually no longer sufficed.
In fact, as optical media continued to get cheaper, I had also come to the conclusion
that CD and especially DVD recordables were totally unreliable. No matter how well I stored
them, I found that many would quit reading after a matter of months or years. But, I
discovered that PD media, and it’s successor DVD-RAM was actually very reliable. So I used
these for years to backup all of my data, and I would always make two copies and take
a handful of them to work to store in my desk drawer there in as an offsite backup. However,
as you can imagine, even 5.2 Gigabytes per disc eventually became a bit obsolete and
the media became harder to find as well, so I eventually had to give up on this too. I
did briefly switch to the larger 9.4 GB DVD-RAM cartridges, but even those eventually became
impossible to find.
Eventually, about 8 years ago, we added some rooms onto our house. I actually did all of
the electrical wiring myself, which our city inspector not only approved but said I did
it better than most electricians. But I also took this opportunity to move the network
closet and build a new one from scratch. And that’s the one I’m going to show you now.
Lets take a look at this photo I showed of my network wall back in the 2013 video, and
now let’s look at it today. As you can see, I’ve added quite a few things over the years.
Every room in the house has 2 or 3 network jacks. The wires run through the attic like
this and eventually converge into this one monster bundle of wires. This is where all
of the ethernet cables from all around the house converge into one place. There’s actually
about 40 wires here. Some people have asked what it is they are going up into. Well, it’s
actually just a pipe fitting I bought at the hardware store that screws together like this.
I just wanted something to protect the sheetrock from all of these cables and give it a nice
aesthetic appearance.
This entire wall is actually a thin sheet of plywood, which has been painted the same
color as the rest of the walls. This makes it possible to mount stuff wherever I want.
I’ve also upgraded this switch to gigabit, but these two here remain the slower 100 megabit,
which really doesn’t matter because I put all of the important stuff on the gigabit
switch anyway. So, for example, it’s really not going to matter if, you know, my Apple
TV, or my printer, for example, is on the 100 megabit switch. In fact, I mean, my internet
connection is only just slightly under 100 megabit anyway. So, for example, Netflix on
my Apple TV isn’t going to run any faster even if this was a gigabit switch.
Down here, I have a new 5 port switch. This one is a power over ethernet, so it is running
my security cameras. Now, I used to have these old analog cameras on my house like these,
but they were not very good. So, I recently replaced them with these Axis network cameras.
Now, a lot of people ask me why I have done my network like this instead of using rack
mount equipment, especially being that I come from an IT background. Well, to be honest,
I hate rack mount stuff, especially in the home. And I really hate patch panels. There
are a few reasons why I prefer doing things like this. For one thing, these switches are
cheaper. Also, patch panels just add an extra layer of unnecessary complexity and wiring
mess. Doing it like this, I can label all of the ports, so I can look at each port and
know immediately what is connected to it. The rest of these that don’t have a label
are actually connected to unused live jacks in the house. And I have a system here, so
this is switch A, and then B, and C. So if I look at a network port on the wall, like
this one which are labelled A14 and A15, I can come right in here and immediately see
where those are connected to my switch. And the last reason I don’t like rack mount
stuff is because they tend to have fans in them, which can be loud and annoying, and
worse the fans go out after a few years and then you have to replace the fans or replace
the equipment. These switches are all passively cooled and work just fine. In fact, these
two switches have been running non stop for at least 10 years, plus I bought them used.
So, I’d say they’re pretty reliable.
And yes, I do have a wifi in my house, but I still absolutely hate wifi for anything
other than portable devices. Speaking of wifi, a lot of people have asked what happened to
my vintage airport I had on the wall of my studio room. Well, I had not been using it
in ages and somebody gave me one of those more modern Airport Extremes, so I thought
I’d hang that in its place, which I did.
However, not 10 minutes after I had the thing hung up, I had to take it back down because
I didn’t realize those things had fans in the bottom of them. And so, after a few minutes
it got hot and then the fan started going roooo, and my studio microphone up above my
head was actually picking that up. And I was just like, no I can’t have that in here
making that kind of noise. So, I had to take it down.
Of course, I still have a regular airport unit in my living room, right next to the
Apple TV, which provides coverage to the whole house.
So, now I want to show you something I didn’t show you in the last video. Take a look at
this. This is a fiber converter, and it’s located at the opposite end of the house.
So, what is this fiber optic cable connected to?
I might have mentioned this before, but my parents live in the house next door. Well,
it’s just my mom now because my father passed away last year. But, we’ve actually lived
in these two houses since the 1990s, when they were built. And during construction,
we buried a conduit between the houses that originally carried a standard ethernet cable.
Now, the reason I didn’t mention this back in the 2013 video is because I was afraid
I might have been breaking some sort of ordinance or regulation or something like that. But,
I’ve researched it a lot since then and the best I can tell I’m not breaking any
sort of law. It’s really no different than sharing your WiFi password with your neighbor.
Of course, back when we put the cable in, we didn’t even have WiFi. That wasn’t
even a thing.
The buried ethernet cable worked fine for several years, but something unfortunate happened.
There was this tree between the houses. Not exactly between, as it was really in the back
yard. But anyway, one day in the early 2000s, lightening struck this tree. In fact, here’s
a picture I took of the tree the next day. And a few weeks later, most of the tree fell
down. You can see a black mark down the center of this piece. Then, we chopped it up and
you can actually see a black mark down the inside of every piece.
The lightening strike destroyed many electronic devices in both houses, including microwaves,
and televisions, and alarm clocks, and things like that. But, that actually wasn’t the
worst of it.
Somehow the lightening traveled from this tree, through the ground, and jumped into
this ethernet cable. I admit, I lack the understanding to explain exactly how this works. Nevertheless,
it fried every device that was connected to ethernet including hubs at both houses, computers,
and anything else. And fortunately, I have some photos from the event. You’ll have
to forgive the quality since digital cameras back then weren’t all that great. First
of all, I was not able to get the wires out of the hub. They were melted in place. So,
at first I just cut them all off like this. However, using some pliers I was eventually
able to get some of the wires out and they were very charred looking. This one here was
the one that was connected to the house next door and it’s charred the worst. I also
disassembled the hub and had a look inside. You can see some of these chips here have
actually popped as well.
I had to go around and replace every RJ45 jack in every wall of both houses. I also
had to replace a lot of computer equipment. Now, I got lucky and some of the computers
only the ethernet card was fried, and I was able to remove the card and just put a new
one in. But, in many cases the motherboards were fried too.
So, I realized I needed one of these ethernet grounding blocks on each side of that buried
cable. So I did get some of these and install them. However, it only helped some. A year
later another lightening storm came through and did a similar type of damage, but on a
much smaller scale. As such, I decided to replace the ethernet cable with this fiber
optic instead. Since there is actually nothing metal or conductive inside this cable, it
is totally immune to lightening strikes. And here’s what it looks like next door with
the matching fiber converter. These things have actually been in place at least 10 years,
and they were bought used so no telling how long they’ve really been working. Nevertheless
they have had a 100% uptime. They are only 100 megabit, but that’s fine for our purposes.
I would also mention people are often curious how I terminated the ends of the fiber cable.
Well, I didn’t. I actually just went on ebay and bought a 100 foot patch cable that
had ends on both sides. And fortunately the conduit was just big enough to pull them through
with the ends attached.
You may also notice that I have another POE switch here, and there are two more cameras
attached. So, there are cameras on both houses.
So, enough about the network itself. Let’s talk about some of the things connected to
it. First of all, if you go back to the 2013 video, I was using multiple external firewire
drives connected to a Mac mini. But now, I am using a Synology NAS. This is a self-contained
system that connects to my network. It has 4 hard drives, each one is 4 terabytes, and
it’s setup in a RAID-5 configuration, so that gives me about 12 terabytes total, with
a redundant drive in case of failure.
But, I wanted to have another redundancy as well. For example, what happens if my house
is destroyed by a tornado, or a fire, or is burglarized and my NAS is stolen. Well, it
occurred to me to put another synology drive next door. So next door I have a little two-bay
unit, which is not using any sort of RAID since it doesn’t really need extra redundancy
since it’s whole function is to be a backup in the first place. Anyway, the two units
actually sync with each other and so I always have a live backup next door.
It doesn’t have a monitor or keyboard, but you can connect to it with your web browser
and it has it’s own little GUI operating system, which is remarkably powerful. It can
do surprising number of server related tasks.
But the main thing I find interesting is that it also supports being a DVR for IP security
cameras. So this unit does double duty as a file server and a security camera DVR. And
you know what, the DVR actually works remarkably well, and I’m saying this as somebody who
used to work on commercial-grade security systems at my last job. So, looking at these
cameras, these 4 here are from my house, and these two here are next door. These cameras
record at 4K resolution, but I have them set to 1080 because I can’t see much difference
and it saves a lot of space. They also look fantastic at night time.
I’m also using a custom router running PFSense.
And, also I used to have a Mac mini in here acting as a server. But I don’t really need
a server anymore, so I have this little Atari… ok it’s not really an Atari, it’s actually
an Intel NUC running Windows 10. I need to keep a windows machine around the house for
some software, so here it is. My main computer, on the other hand is still a Mac mini, although
it has been upgraded since the last video. And yeah, this is where I do all of my video
editing, emailing, and shipping.
And the last thing I’ll mention. A lot of people ask if this network equipment in here
is functional or is it just a decoration? And, the answer is actually both. So, it is
functional because this switch here does uplink and connect to the network closet on the opposite
end of the house. And I actually have several ethernet jacks up underneath my studio bench
here, which I can use if I have like, you know equipment out here that needs an ethernet
connection, which admittedly isn’t all that often. But, the thing is, yes, it’s functional.
But, I would, for example, never separate my wires on a wall like this. I mean, this
is extremely inefficient. Normally, I would just bundle them all together in one bundle.
But keep in mind that when I originally designed this studio it was actually meant for an entirely
different channel where I was going to be dressing up like a mad scientist.
The theme to this show was mostly going to be critiquing all of the bad science in movies
and TV shows. And I had all kinds of crazy stuff including a brain in a jar which was
my sidekick voiced by my friend Matt Kendrick. And this character was called Morby, which
was based on Morbius from a classic episode of Doctor Who.
But that show was far too difficult to make, so ended up abandoning it pretty early. But
that hopefully does explain some of the design cues you see around here. For example, even
the front of this studio bench, you know with all of the big metal screws and everything
was, supposed to kind of have that mad scientist, Frankenstein type look to it. But anyway,
I guess that wraps it up for this episode so as always, thanks for watching!