From a chaotic close-frame cabinet to a proper 42U rack — 6 months in
Started this as "I'll just add a managed switch" and somehow ended up tearing the whole thing down and rebuilding into a 42U StarTech rack. Sharing the then/now because the difference still makes me laugh.
Photos 1–2 (NOW): Pro-Max-16-PoE core + Pro-24-PoE leaf landed on a proper Cat6A patch panel, AdGuard stats up on the rack-mounted display, room labels actually legible (MyL, Kiara, Eliam, Eslie, Lvng Rm), and the bottom half is breathing — UniFi UPS, switched PDU, NAS shelf with actual airflow instead of gear stacked wherever it fit.
Photos 3–4 (THEN): the old open-frame cabinet — TP-Link unmanaged switch, TL-SX3008F 10G aggregation, cables routed wherever they'd reach, Mac mini and NAS just sitting loose on a shelf, ARRIS modem hanging off the wall with a rat's nest behind it. It worked, but every troubleshooting session meant tracing cable by hand.
What changed under the hood:
Core/leaf switching: UniFi USW-Pro-Max-16-PoE as core, USW-24-PoE as leaf for bulk PoE/cameras. One gotcha worth sharing — that inter-switch trunk is hard-capped at 1G since the leaf is the standard Gigabit model, not the Pro version.
Routing/firewall: Firewalla Gold handles all VLAN policy and routing; UniFi stays strictly switching/WiFi.
9 VLANs segmenting trusted devices, IoT, kids' WiFi, guests, cameras, NAS, voice assistants, security, and AV.
AdGuard Home for network-wide DNS filtering, dashboard rack-mounted for at-a-glance stats.
UPS-backed power chain — UniFi UPS → switched PDU → all critical loads, replacing the old surge-only setup.
Real cable management this time: structured patch panels instead of "however the cable reached."
Next up:
A Dell PowerEdge T420 going in as the "main brain" — Proxmox host for Home Assistant, AdGuard, Frigate (with a Coral TPU), Immich, primary ZFS storage, and eventually a local LLM.
A small side project with my kid: turning a retired Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro into a mini homelab box — Ubuntu Server → SSH → a Minecraft server, as a hands-on way to learn networking basics.
A 10G fiber run out to a garage cabinet build (gaming PC, consoles, AP — all on their own VLANs), and closet cooling, since cramming all this into a former coat closet generates more heat than you'd expect.
Happy to answer questions on the VLAN setup, the switch gotcha, or the cable management glow-up.