About three years ago I did a tour of my home network and it turned out to be way more popular
than I had imagined. Well a lot has changed since then I am going to give you an updated
tour and show you what it looks like today!Stick around til the end of this video and I will
answer a ton of the common questions I get about all of this.In the 2017 video we started
outside where Frontier Communications installed their Optical Network Terminal. Many of you
mistook this for my own router. An ONT is owned by the ISP and is responsible for converting
the fiber connection over to gigabit Ethernet, POTS lines, and Cable TV service. I don't
have any access to the device.Well, since that video I Frontier has made a lot of changes.
First, they moved the ONT inside my garage into a different housing. This was at my request
because I felt like the old install was a hack job. Second, my speed has been increased
to gigabit, albeit still about 30% higher than AT&T is charging right down the street
for the same service.As mentioned in the 2017 tour, we had our builder put a dedicated AV
closet off the theater room. This room has changed a lot too! I now run my entire network
on Ubuquiti Unifi gear and I love it! My core switch is a Unifi US-XG-16. This where all
of my server gear plugs in, or anything that needs 10 gig. My access switch is a Unifi
USW-Pro-48 Gen 2. This is where everything else in the house plugs in, including PoE
cameras, desktop PCs, TVs, etc. Anywhere in the house, that I need more ports than I have
wall jacks, is a Unifi US-60W 8 port managed switch. These are awesome because not only
do they support PoE, but they are all part of the SDN allowing me to pass security policy,
VLANs, etc. while remote monitoring them via SNMP. In the case of my living room, this
means I can have my security camera on secure network and my TV on the regular network.For
my firewall I have replaced the old one with a SuperMicro 5018D-FN8T. This server is designed
to be used as a router or firewall appliance and has 12 gigabit ports, two SFP+ for 10
gig, and an IPMI management port. It's uplinked to the core switch with a 10 gig fiber SFP+.
It's running a XEON D-1518 and 32 gigs of RAM. This allows me to run lots of OpenVPN
sessions, including a VPN to my brother's house The 8 Bit Guy, pfBlocker, IPS and IDS
for security, and more. In my opinion this is the absolute best box you can buy to run
a large pfSense firewall on.Now let's move on to my servers and storage. In the 2017
video I was running two homebrew servers with Intel Core I7 7700K CPUs and 32 gigs of RAM
each. I also had a Synology RS2416+ for storage.Today, things here have changed quite a bit as well!
I am now running two SuperMicro 5019P-M 1U servers. Both have XEON 4114 scalable CPUs
with 96GB of RAM. These are running VMWare ESXi and get their storage from a Synology
RS3618xs running a XEON D-1521 and 32 gigs of RAM. These are all connected to the core
switch with redundant 10 gig links.Let's break this down a bit....First we have two SuperMicro
5019P-M servers running a VMware cluster with HA and DRS enabled. This allows virtual machines
to move between these two servers to balance the load or to recover automatically from
a hardware failure. Both of these boxes are identical configurations. I named them TARDIS
1 and TARDIS 2, because they are bigger on the inside.Next I have a Synolgy RS3418xs
NAS with 88 terabytes raw capacity, and an RS2416+ NAS with 24 terabytes raw capacity.
The 2416 has been replaced under warranty due to the Intel Atom bug.OK. So what runs
on all of this hardware? On the TARDIS vSphere cluster I run
* Plex for serving video to all of my devices * Homeseer for home automation
* Vcenter Server for managing the virtual machines
* MySQL for backend databases * Windows Domain controllers
* Ubuntu servers for all kinds of things such as time servers
* A full copy of Wikipedia in case of the zombie apocolypse
* And Observium to monitor all of my hardware and servers
On NAS 1 I have: * a 42 terabyte volume that stores all of
my PLEX video, as well as the file shares for my video editing Mac.
* a 24 terabyte volume for VMWare where all of my virtual machines live. This volume is
fronted by two Samsung EVO 860 SSDs to add some performance.
On NAS 2 I have: * a 9 terabyte volume for Surveillance Station.
This is the NVR for all of my cameras. * and another 9 terabyte volume for general
file storage and sync share for Dropbox.
OK. So back to the network for a minute. I still use this HD Homerun Extend to distribute
an antenna signal to all of my TVs and devices over Ethernet. PLEX integrates with this natively
allows me to watch live TV anywhere in the house (or the world for that matter).I also
still use the Homeseer Z-Net for connecting my Z-Wave devices to the Homeseer virtual
machine. For those wondering, this is indeed nothing more than a Raspberry Pi with a Z-Wave
Hat and some proprietary Homeseer software.One major change I have made is that I've moved
my entire house to Ubiquiti Unifi wireless access points. I personally think these are
the absolute best access points you can buy for a home network. I couldn't be happier.
I also run a guest network on these APs through pfSense that allow any of my visiting friends
or family to get Internet access without having access to my home network, albeit throttled
to 100 mbit.In the 2017 video I also mentioned that I had a dedicated exhaust fan in the
server room running 24/7 to remove heat. This is still in place. However, I did upgrade
the fan to a much larger CFM version just a few months ago. This dropped the temperature
in this room by almost 20 degrees.Now let's move to my office.I no longer use a Mac as
my primary workstation. I just got fed up with Apple and went back to Windows. I'm running
a Core I9 with 64 gigabyte of RAM and a 1080ti video card. It's plenty for any of the games
I play. I also have a second monitor that I use to see my surveillance cameras outside
and check on system performance in Observium.I also have a 16" Macbook Pro setup for video
editing. I mainly keep the Mac around because I just can't bring myself to switch off of
Final Cut Pro. I just like it so much better than anything on Windows.Over here I have
my electronics station where I work on Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects. You've likely seen
this in many of my videos. And behind it is my computer museum where I have many old computers
on display. Mostly ones I used as a kid growing up.So let's talk about things around my house
that are connected to the rest of my home network.All around the house you will cameras
for security. Originally I put in D-LINK, but after about 6 months literally every one
of them died and got tossed in the garbage. Since then I have replaced every single camera
with AXIS. They've been rock solid and reliable.The alarm system is on a secure VLAN and has digital
touch-pads throughout the house.I have digital keypads on the doors that connect to Homeseer
and the alarm systems (although these actually connect to Z-Wave and then bridged to the
security network).Every TV in the house has an Apple TV for video streaming from the PLEX,
Netflix, etc.My pool is connected to the network, although its also on a separate VLAN to keep
the pool company out of my home network.Our Tesla Model X loves to chew up some bandwidth
every evening as it uploads telemetry to Tesla's neural network.I still use Logitech Harmony
Hubs for automating my media gear. It seems to work fine and integrates well with Homeseer.
I also still use Alexa in many places throughout the house as the primary voice control for
home automation. And of course R2-D2 loves to get on the home network too!OK. So I am
going to address the most common questions that I got from the 2017 video. Hopefully
they will apply to this video as well.So the first one is: Why is your cable management
so bad? And I think a lot of people are confusing the lab portion of my home network with the
permanently installed portion of my home network and I think if you'll back through the video
you'll see that anywhere I installed something permanently cable management looks really
well. But I am not going to spend hours and hours dressing in cables for something I am
likely to change in just a couple of weeks. So I think if you look back through the video
you'll see the difference.OK. So the next most common question is: So why the plywood
and red walls in your server closet? And so first of all let me address the red walls.
And so I think many of you must have missed the fact that this is a server closet off
of our theater room. And so the theater room is painted red so that it looks like a theater
room. And so when the builder sprayed that closet he just continued to spray the same
paint. I am not sure why that is such a big deal to people but that is why the walls are
red.As far as plywood. Plywood is very commonly used in server closets and network closets
and it is because when you mount something on the wall you generally have to look for
a stud when you're mounting something to sheetrock, which is what we have here in the states.
So if you mount a piece of three quarter inch or one inch plywood on the wall first then
you can mount things anywhere you want without having to find a stud. So that's the reason
for plywood.OK. So next up. I got a lot of people complaining that "You mounted your
router on the outside of the house and anyone can hack you!" Uh. I think you are confusing
an ONT or Optical Network Terminal with a router or a firewall. An ONT is something
that is provided by the telco or ISP and is usually used in fiber to the home installs
which is what we have here. So in this case the telco installs this ONT on the side of
the house in most cases, although they've recently moved it to the garage in our install,
but that's because I asked them to do it for a completely different reason because I wanted
to be able to use a UPS and some other things on the box. With that said I don't have any
access to that appliance. It is completely owned and operated by the telco and that is
how they all work. The purpose of the ONT is to covert the fiber connection from the
ISP or from the phone company over to CAT5 for Ethernet, I think it is RG6 for coax for
cable TV and over to POTS lines for standard phone service. And so that is all their device
and I don't have any control over it and that is why it was mounted on the outside of the
house. It is not my firewall or my router.
OK. So next up. "Alexa is just a spy device in your house and they are listening to everything
that you say." It's funny to me that people are so worried about my Alexa listening to
everything that I say yet they don't seem to care much about the cellphone they carry
in their pocket which is connected to the internet no matter where they go. I think
you guys have a problem where you're a little worried about stuff for no reason maybe? Not
sure about that.
Next up is the "SuperMicro servers have Chinese spyware built into the motherboard." OK. This
has been debunked like a thousand times. The guy who originally reported that was short
selling SuperMicro stock and he was looking to drive the stock price down because he was
loosing his shorts. That guy is now in prison. There is no firmware or motherboard chipset
that is spying on you.
OK. Next up. I see this constantly. "Well if you really cared about security!" [puts
on tinfoil hat] Need I say more?
Another question I commonly get is "Why in the world are you using a Mac when you have
that awesome gaming rig? You can do all of your video editing on that!" Well. I have
to tell you and you can disagree with me if you like... but Final Cut Pro is so much better
than any offering on the PC. I have tried them all and most recently I tried Premiere
Pro on the PC. I have an Adobe Create Cloud license (or membership, whatever you want
to call it) and I couldn't stand it. I just absolutely hated it, and the way that Final
Cut Pro works on the Mac is just so much better. I am not going to spend hours talking about
it, but that's why I use a Mac still because you just can't beat that piece of software.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this home network tour updated for 2020. Let me know if you
have any questions or any other things you'd like to see in the next updated tour, which
will probably be in a couple of years. Thanks for watching!