In our last video, we introduced the new home of The Geek Pub and took a tour of the building’s
various rooms and what we planned to do with them.
Since then, we’ve been hard at work getting the building ready for a certificate of occupancy.
This meant doing various things required by the city, such as installing new fire extinguishers,
and replacing dead batteries in exit signs and emergency lighting.
And a few other things like replacing that old thermostat.
So it wouldn’t be The Geek Pub if it didn’t have a smart thermostat.
We even had an overhead door opener installed in the shop area!
So after getting our certificate of occupancy it was time to head off to Alltex Electronics
to get some fun toys for the server closet.
Now, Alltex is one of my very favorite places!
I could spend all day here.
But for this trip we just need a server cabinet and some ladder racking for the server closet.
With the F150 all loaded up, we delivered the cabinet to the building and rolled it
to the server room.
With the server rack in position, it’s time to measure and install the ladder racking.
Ladder acts as a bridge of sort that supports all of the cabling in a server room.
Installing the ladder is super simple.
Just some toggle bolts into the metal studs, making sure everything is level and square.
Since the shop isn’t yet setup, I just used the tailgate of my truck as a workbench to
cut the ladder using a little DeWalt handheld bandsaw.
Once the ladder is set atop the braces, you hold it in place permanently using J-Bolts.
They act sorta like little clamps.
OK so now that we have the first piece of ladder up I'm going to slide the rack back
into the place where I wanted to live permanently and then we'll measure how long we need for
the extension that comes off of the main ladder.
So with a quick measurement and another visit to the bandsaw we have the piece we need.
One end will be supported by the cabinet, while the other end is attached to the first
ladder section using these T-splices.
It’s also a clamp style design using a bolt to squeeze the two halves together making
for a quite sturdy bond.
Yeah.
This looks really nice!
So there's this big mess of analog cables that are coming out of the ceiling and I was
going to leave them here so that I could use them as pull strings for all of the other
cameras, but it is just an absolute rats nest above the ceiling.
So I'm just going to go ahead and chop them off.
Hopefully I can still use some of them for pull strings, but oh my god these have to
go.
Since the old owners literally left the patch panel hanging from the wires and they were
already fed inside the wall, I decided to put in a swing out patch panel mount and just
leave it on the wall rather than relocating it to the server cabinet.
The swing out panel will make it much easier to add cabling later, and we plan to add a
lot of them for cameras and the security system!
Sooo…
Spectrum literally just left me a pile of equipment on the floor.
So I guess we should start by getting this all cleaned up.
Since this stuff isn’t rackmount I started by putting a shelf in the cabinet to hold
it all.
Since I have static IP service, I am required to use their equipment.
Gross.
Next, I laid the Spectrum Coax cable into the ladder and tied it down.
Unfortunately, Alltex was out of stock on the cable managers for this Tripp-Lite cabinet,
so I am just velcroing it to the sides for now.
At the top of the rack, I put in a Ubiquity Pro 48 Port PoE switch.
Below that, I put in a 10 Gigabit capable pfSense firewall.
I have a write up on this unit at TheGeekPub.com.
At the bottom of the cabinet, I started by putting in a battery pack, this will add much
needed runtime to the UPS.
On top of that goes the actual UPS.
I sized everything to run the servers for about 4 hours.
Next up is a 12 bay Synology.
This guy acts as the NVR for recording all of the cameras.
Then another more powerful 12 bay Synology that acts as the storage array for our VMWare
cluster and storage appliance for video editing.
Top that off with a couple of SuperMicros 1U servers packed with processor and RAM for
the actual compute.
And, we’re still waiting on the cable managers to arrive so its pretty messy behind.
Ah sound of screaming servers.
You know…
I think I like the sound of screaming servers probably about as much as LGR likes wood grain.
So some of you are probably asking why in the world do you need this type of setup?
And the truth of the matter is you don't have to have this type of setup, but it does work
really well for me.
I'm running a business and I need a place to store all of my data.
I need something to record all of the cameras.
So I have an NVR and then I have all kinds of servers and in fact I'll post a link in
the description below to another video where I kind of gave a tour of all this equipment
and what it does and what it's for.
But just a quick refresher is that I do have like windows domain controllers on here I
have some VDI workstations on here for working remotely this is where I do all of my video
editing so anytime I do video editing it all goes here any photography that I take for
articles and things like that all wind up here as well as I run just all kinds of basic
stuff like you know DNS and DHCP.
And all of those things all right here one thing I didn't show for some reason the video
footage didn't take there is also actually a ubiquiti 10 gig switch in here that's the
back end that connects all this stuff together so the servers actually have a dual 10 gigs
for 20 Gigabit connectivity into the disk array so that's where they get all their storage
from but yeah that's what it's for I do have a backup of this all off site so in the case
of a disaster or something like that I do have all of my data for a rainy day.
With the server room up and running, it was now time to focus on installing all of the
wireless access points and AXIS cameras.
And that meant running a ton of cables in the ceiling.
I just laid the cable on top of the tiles but made sure to run a path where I can come
back and add J-Hooks at a later point to suspend them from the red iron.
Running cables and crimping on ends always takes me back in time to one of my first technology
jobs.
For the wireless access points, I of course chose Ubiquiti AC Pros.
We’ll have several of these around the building, and of course we’ll also have a guest wireless
network for our visitors to use.
While I worked on the access points, David got to work pulling runs for the security
cameras.
And boy do we have ton of those!
We put security in strategic locations.
This includes each corner of the building, and various places around the interior.
We even have a camera watching over the dumpster for those who dump illegally.
After finishing up, we just need to put all of the ceiling tiles back in place.
And although we have a bit more to do and some cable cleanup left, the ladder rack is
starting to look really nice!
Well that about wraps it up for this video!
Thank you guys so much for watching!
So if you come back we will have videos on a new shop tour which you can kind of see
here.
I've been working on it.
We're going to build the what I consider to be (well I hope to be) the ultimate electronics
station.
And so we're going to build that for the electronics room.
We're going to do all of our repairs on vintage computers or Arduino projects or those types
of things.
And then we still have yet to build the new YouTube studio set.
I really want a set that I can sit in front of and have some kind of background that's
a little bit more exciting than this.
And so we're going to try to build the ultimate YouTube set.
Don't know what that looks like either but we will figure it out!
See you in the next video!