Some ways to save money: - Use cheaper OM3 instead of OM4, you can still do 100 gigabit at 100 meters over OM3, more than enough for home use. OM4 is overkill. - Use copper or fiber SFP+ DACs instead of OM3/10GBASE-SR where applicable. Think of DACs as the SFP+ modules and the cable integrated into a single assembly. They're usually cheaper, especially for short runs like a switch to a device in the same room or same rack. - Look into cheaper switches from companies like MikroTik instead of Ubiquiti, you can save hundreds if you do that and right-size the switches. - Shop around for all this. Understand the price of SFP+ modules and OM3 cables from different vendors to make sure you're not overpaying. For example, Ubiquiti charges $38 for a pair of SFP+ modules, but you can get a pair of equivalent 10GTek on Amazon for $30, and I've seen them even cheaper elsewhere. Do pay attention to advertised compatibility though. Some caveats or other random notes to consider: - Don't rely on RJ45 SFP+ modules unless you can't avoid it. They run very hot (enough to burn you) because they draw more power than fiber modules, may overheat passively cooled switches if you put too many in one switch, and are limited to 30 meters at 10 gigabit (because they can't get enough power in SFP+ to go farther). - You can get coupling RJ45 keystone jacks too, you don't have to wire the ethernet cable to the keystone jack if you don't want to. I did some ethernet through a wall between rooms and just used a few thin pre-terminated one foot long cat6 cables between the keystones. - If you're installing LC connector fiber keystones in a wall, pay close attention to the boot length of the fiber cable you're putting inside the wall! Most walls and keystone jacks won't have enough space between the two sheets of drywall to fit a normal LC connector fiber cable (not without a nasty bend), so buy short-boot LC connector cables for this use case. - Any time you're putting cables in/through walls/ceilings/etc, make sure you get cables that are appropriately rated for this. Riser/CMR/OFNR for in-wall, plenum/CMP/OFNP for in floors/ceilings/ventilation/etc, with plenum/CMP/OFNP being the better rating (still good for in-wall). This is all about fire safety. You might think none of this matters, until there's a fire and the maybe the cables you ran through a ceiling shorted against something and started the fire, or maybe their insulation jacket was flammable and let the fire spread much faster through your house by bypassing fire breaks like walls and doors.
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Have you used MikroTik much? How robust are these in the long run?
Mikrotik probably has the best value in the market. The only downside : you need to be very knowledgeable to do a proper configuration. I would go for Mikrotek immediately if support would be affordable...
I bought a spool of 1,000 ft of OM4. For about $300 I bought the supplies (Jonard fiber stripper, cleaver, AFL LC FastConnect) to learn how terminate my own fiber. I don't work with twisted pair a ton but am comfortable putting on RJ-45 and punching down keystones. On my first attempt with putting fiber ends on I got a light/signal and was capable of connecting. I went through about three LC connectors before getting a couple tips that made it easier and cleaner (likely for better quality connections). Point being that for not that much money and a little bit of time and focus you too can terminate multi- or singlemode fiber. Both are the same technique and dimensions when you get down to the 125um cladding. The AFL FastConnect OM4 (Laser Optimized) LC connectors are about US$75 a six-pack and the OM4 fiber was about $300 for 1,000 ft. If you have any interest I'd be glad to give you the links to what I bought or the tips for terminating. A few hundred bucks and two hours time you'll be terminating like you're Lenny Lightwave! Even though premade is so much easier I wanted to nerd out and learn the skill. Have about 10 fiber runs in my house now including 25GbE to a couple computers.
yep i bought a kit for 50 USD in thailand included cleaver, optical power meter, test illuminator a bag and stuff GREAT and my local fibre guys donated to me 1km of new cable with catenary in it for a bottle of whiskey (3USD) But this is AMAZING THAILAND be careful you dont get fibres in your fingers or worse!!! Do it in the yard..
@@DerekDavis213 It makes almost no sense! I used OM4 but just wanted to learn the skill and wasn’t sure of how many runs I was going to put in or the length, but I agree, kinda impractical although not that difficult either. But yeah, for a couple runs, just buy premade.
@@CompletelyLawless I have made many Cat5e patch cables myself. I can terminate one end of that cable in about 1 minute. I have an AMP crimper and use AMP/Tyco plugs with load bars. How long does it take to properly terminate and polish two LC connectors on one side of the OM4 cable?
Every DC I’ve worked in has layers of daisy chained switches. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it. As long as you have sufficient bandwidth cross linking them and you lay out you clients to minimised chatter across those links. Putting your network storage on the switch with clients most likely to be doing large transfers to them keeps more of the data on the backplane and off the wire.
Technically yes but it introduces sort of a single point of failure too. Say your whole network goes down you need to figure out which switch is actually causing the problem. If you have an agg and the whole network goes down you know it’s the agg
I agree for smaller installations. I tried to fix a setup in a larger student dorm were the second switch stopped working. There were 4 more switches behind it, so there way more affected people than necessary. The sad part was that the uplinks were 1gbit, so chaining them was not a smart idea from the beginning. Having an aggregation switch improved the situation a lot.
@@dukeseb that’s true, more devices increases your chance of an outage to at least part of the network. The nice thing about setups like ubiquity or Omada is they have basic monitoring out of the box which takes some of the guesswork out of network diagnostics.
@@dukeseb Management systems/software fixes this issue. And if you have a large enough home lab, you have dual core switches, edge switches, etc. And they are all "plugged together," using proper trunking. I get notified of a broken port, broken switch (heck even a broken fan) in seconds. I can choose what to do about it when I need to. IP cameras make this redundancy hard, but still manageable.
I didn't realize who I was going to watch when I clicked on this but the moment I heard your voice I knew exactly who you are. Edgerly waiting for the next episode of self hosted
@@ElliotWeishaar Audiobookshelf is really great and I host it for several of my family members using Tailscale. VyOS is on my list for sure as a potential declarative configuration based replacement for Opnsense.
10GBASE-T is amazing and annoying at the same time: It runs with really sophisticated line coding, right up against the shannon limit of the cable. That makes it power hungry, and very sensitive to non-perfect termination and connector contact. Combine that with mechanical compromises made in a cat6(a) connector in order to get the bandwidth in an 8P8C connector, and you get why I no longer use it where I have a patch panel in the path. Your network diagram looks like RSTP is next on the list of things to try - Then you could have unplugged the DAC cables without disturbing the video watchers. And finally, congratulations on now having error counters on all ports. Life is hard enough without them :-)
I found the connectors for cat7 way easier to handle. They are more expensive, but you don't need special tools for them. I use them with cat 6 coupler keystones and never had an issue with them. I get a bit over 900mbit till the RAM Cache of my NAS is full. Going with couplers is not really recommend best practice - but for your Home Lab, it can be a valid choice.
I'm a Network + certified but I have to admit: I'm a little intimidated with fiber. I've never worked with fiber. I'm feeling better now after your extremely good video. Thanks a lot!
I like your custom plywood server rack, that's brilliant. I also like your advice on using a keystone patch panel for easier customization. You're a genius man.
I just upgraded to 2.5gbe, it came on pc, it came on my router, a switch was very cheap and so was a dongle for my NAS. I am very happy with it. 10gbe can wait.
@@ktzsystems DSM 7.1 has beta SMB Multichannel support, so I will try a cheap second nic for my pc and second dongle for the nas this summer for 5gbe ( or near enough) my ancient cat5a will last me a long time yet.Nearly everything else is connected to my Netgear Nighthawk 120 on 5GHz WiFi.
If it's included that's great. But realistically it's still too slow since an SSD can outperform it. Any modern HDD can hit 2Gb or so. Lot's of internet providers are already rolling out multigig internet making the 2.5Gb the restriction
@@mrmotofy Precisely why i went 10GbE. With EPON, my ISP gives me "up to" 8gb download and i am constantly bumping against the LAN 2.5gb limit. First world problem really it's super fast already but hey, why not enjoy the full bandwidth if the neighbors don't use it? :)
While the Unifi Aggregation switch shows 10GbE as the negotiated speed, I have successfully connected 2.5GbE and 5 GbE devices to it using a 10GBase-T SFP+ to RJ-45 transceiver. They functioned perfectly at those speeds with no issues. The devices themselves properly reported 2.5Gb and 5Gb on their interfaces.
Found the same, it's dependant on the SFP+ to Ethernet module you use, some do it, some don't. The switch sees the 10G connection to the module, the module then does the negotiation with the client. I use 10GTEK SFP+ to ethernet modules, and they do that. I also use their fibre modules between my Unifi switches (USW-Agg, USW-24-POE and USW-Pro-24-POE).
I've done this too for a cheaper upgrade to my Dell Micro server. I bought a trendnet USB 2.5 ethernet adapter and ran it to my USW-Agg on copper with a 10Gtek transceiver worked. The transceiver is doing the autonegotiation _I think_ because the Agg switch shows 10GbE and it works. for the 3 x $80 on cabling, USB adapters, and transceiver it was just barely cheaper than the 10GbE mini switch from ubiquiti though so.. weigh your options I guess.
Hi, awesome video! A a little correction from my side: With some SFP Module you are capable of using 2.5gbE wit hthe USW-Aggregation. The Module will Negotiate 10gbE with the Module, but the Module will Negotiate 2.5 with the Network Device. The 10Gtek ASF-10G-T is one of those capable of doing that. here is a quote from the Unifi Forums: "The 10Gtek ASF-10G-T is autonegotiating the 10g connection on the SFP+ side and the 2.5G connection on the RJ45 side."
fwiw, Unifi's SFP+ to RJ45 adapter is supposed to support SFP+ to 1/2.5/5/10 GbE, part no UACC-CM-RJ45-MG. $65 USD. I have not tried this yet, but intend to use this transceiver between the Netgate/pfSense 4200 router RJ-45, 2.5GbE port to the Unifi 10GbE Agg switch or directly to the downstream switch SFP+ port.
I run 10gbe copper at home for ~18m, but my cable is the very expensive Nexans cat6a, then the cable is terminated with cat6 keystones and then using 1m cat6a patch cables to the devices for short runs use passive DACs, they use a whole lot less power, don't need SFP/+ modules and they have much lower latency than fiber
The shorter the cable is, the less the cat standard matters. You can easily run Cat 6a or 7 through your house and use a thin, badly shielded but highly flexible cable from the patch panel to the switches. That makes life easier.
Extremely useful video. The way that you explain things is calm and I really like it that way. Even someone with some experience in networking like me enjoyed these simple explanations which means that they are truly great!
Great video.. I've been on the fence about going 2.5gbe vs all the way to 10g and your video really helped make sense of it all. Your presentation style is impeccable.
25:00 the factory does not clean the fibers. You need to clean them yourself. From the factory there are particles of stuff on it. I scope them everyday at work. They usually work ok without cleaning, but they are not clean. When i clean them i get a better lite reading.
@@Starlite123 Of course it's little better, but I've never seen anyone do that in all the DCs I've worked in for the last 30 years, if the fiber is already damaged cleaning doesn't help anyway and they don't damage that quickly.
Thank you for a very informative video! Tech, clearly explained Ina user-friendly manner. The bar has been set! I am chomping at the bit while our cable guys take our neighborhood from FTTN to FTTH this summer. This video will help me to get ready internally..Thanks again!
I segmented my house into two halves as well, the top and bottom floors are linked with a single SFP+ fiber cable from UI. USW-24-pro poe up stairs and down.
@@ktzsystems I chose the ubiquiti one that already has the fiber attached. What I’m slightly concerned about is one of the transceivers going bad and having to replace the entire cable somehow which isn’t possible because we already fixed all the drywall.
Nice video, I’ve been using the udm max and 16poe switch with 10gb green nas and it’s all wonderful. Been looking to fiber for a long run from the workshop(where the server resides) to the house in the future, nice to know I’m almost ready to go with a couple of transceivers. Be interesting if we see more small switches that mix SFP+ with rj45 for those satellite breakout areas. Thanks again for adding clarity to the fiber options.
On Cat.6A cables, 10gbit dropout is always from two of these: 1. not using a very good termination on your keystone and even not using a keystone at all. 2. bends on the cable at an angle of 90 or less, that will destroy the data in your cable.
Thank you for your video. I appreciate you sharing what worked, what didn't and why. I am starting to setup a 10g network in my home and I will be using some Unifi products.
I love the video, the way you explain and talk thru all the elements, the reasoning behind, the editing! Amazing :) At home we have everything on the basement but for that we needed to extend all the CAT6 cables that where terminated in the ground floor (aka female keystone to a new cable going to the main networking/servers rack) plus run some CAT6A additional ones. That was a lot of work haha. Some of the CAT6A connect to an USW Aggregation using RJ45 SFP+ transceivers but I'm still questioning if we should have ran OM4 like you did instead for the devices that are 10G and are not in the basement.
I wonder how long it will be where PON style fibre 10G-PON with just one strand will be a standard. It is very cheap to run with connector small enough to fit in the existing conduit. I could literally pull my cat5a out and pull the fibre in.
The switch in my home network is an Aruba S2500 POE+. It has 4 SFP+ 10G ports and 48 POE+ 1g ports. (I got it used on ebay for dirt cheap) I only have 4 wired devises on my network. They include my work station, my media server, my Blue Iris server, and unused 10g port saved for an unfinished build. Everything else is either a POE powered security camera or a wireless device. It all fits in my 25U rack. Even my workstation is in my rack. Its all nice and tidy, meets my needs and works. Once I learn how to fully use a layer 3 managed switch, I plan to use vlans to segment my network. The wireless stuff together, my security cameras together, and any future IOT stuff I may start messing about with will be together. I have a lot to still learn but its a fun hobby.
@@ktzsystems It has 48 POE+ ports so the power draw is probably up there. Its certainly not silent but I can't hear it above the window mounted AC unit when the air is one in my office.
i have started out with 1 gig to my mancave and when i went all out on unifi, i added 10gb fibre to my mancave, which is about 10-15m away from the house
Great video , I've just joined the cult of ubiquiti the last few month and I'm slowly upgrading , people who say to just use a single switch and don't daisy chain have never retro fitted networking in a house ? Most of my gear is upstairs so starting with my 10g there , my gear is a ultra router , to a 8 port poe switch , which gives me 3 camera + a AP with a trunk upstairs to a 16 pro max switch , with 2 trunks one to loft a 8 port poe with 2 cameras and a AP and the other to the garage to 8 port poe 1 camera and 1 AP. I need a faster way to get from downstairs to upstairs which is limited to 1 gb . I wish the Flex 10 GbE had a SFP+ port so I could use a SFP+ port from upstairs to downstairs , going from SFP+ to RJ45 is stupidly expensive and cheap to other way around.
so i just bought a house, and while i dont expect internerspeeds in my rural area to get above teh 1gb speed i have now i did future proof abit, im using a UDM-PRO as my base, (thought about opnsense but it kept crashing and dropping same iwth pf sense couldnt get them to be stable), anyway i have 3 bedrooms on main floor with living room kitchen, 2 offices in basement and a living room, each room in the house has 1 dedicated cat6 and 1 poe dedicated cat 6, as well as a conduit for future runs, in my attic i just ran 4 pairs of om4 fibre as i plan on having a unifi poe switch there for cameras and 2 building to building bridges, 1 that goes to my garage and 1 that will go to a greenhouse im building in the back of my property, each will house a 24 port poe switch but probably just like 8poe 16 not poe, :D great video gave me alot to think about for future fibre runs in the house, i apologize for my spelling i see alot of red lines lol
@@ktzsystems so I have decided to run 2 pair om4 to my attic where I’m putting a poe switch and also 2 pair to my garage underground using half inch conduit 1 foot deep you gave me a lot to think about and the cost is not a issue compared to the amount of runs I need of cat 6
I don't know that I'd call that daisy chaining. The whole purpose of the aggregation switch is connecting switches together, so connecting one aggregation switch to another one seems pretty normal. It just sucks that the cheap one is a layer 2 switch.
Cat 6a cable can easily go 10g for 100m. The thing is that most Cat 6a connections use normal rj45 jacks that are crimped with normal Cat 5e or Cat 6 crimpers. Although this will pass the 8 pair connectivity tester, they will fail miserably on the Fluke test! To get your Cat 6a connections to work properly you have to use a Cat 6a keystone jack and then connect that to a Cat 6a certified patch cable. Alternatively just get the Telegartner MFP8 field connectors (or something similar) and connect directly one end to the other. If you do that, your Cat 6A connection will easily go even 40G if for only 100 feet. If Cat 6A cable is not using properly terminated connections ... you will actually have less performance than Cat 5e connections as the Cat 6A cable has heavy shielding which can work against you by propagating interference.
Thank you for the very stimulating video. I currently use 2 TP-Link Stackable JetStream 24-port Gigabit T1700G-28TQ Smart Switches, each with 4 SFP+ ports. I installed 10GbE SPF+ cards in the servers (Proxmox, Truenas, Backup) and an Asus XG-C100C 10GbE RJ45 card in the clients. Firewall is an OPNsense - works! Can you also say why you don't use a Unifi firewal in addition to the Unifi switches instead of OPNsense?
Thanks for the demo and info, I appreciate you sharing the network layout. I have three Mikrotik CSS326-24G-2S+RM 24 port Gigabit Ethernet switch with two SFP+ ports that tie my garage, computer room, and living room. But looking at your setup, I guess I should put the Unifi Aggregation switch in the middle, making it a star, since I was just daily chaining them at this time with a 10GBase-T SFP+ to RJ-45 Transceiver
The last "mile" would be copper into a SFP transceiver. But more likely you'd have a switch with a couple of SFP+ ports and half a dozen standard gigabit ethernet jacks.
@KTZ Systems Did you mean to say "cat5e" instead of "cat6a" when describing your cabling issues? I just ran full cat6a (~3000 feet of cat6a that is as thick as quad-shielded coax and is hard to work with when running through the installation holes when at scale of ten or more cables.) for my cameras, and drops for rooms. I did this work last year throughout my home and the cable you just showed in your reference is not cat6a at timestamp 10:47 . (Where is the shielding and the cable overall diameter looks more like regular cat6 or cat5e). I have 120ft runs from my basement to my attic and upper level devices and everything is solid. However, this is now irrelevant because you have already invested in fiber to your problem is now solved.).
When I was taking a random networking class around 2006, the enterprise gear was all CLI and no unified management. And that's what it was like all around town I was told since those companies provided the Cisco gear we were working with in the lab at school. I'm actually surprised it's normal now to centrally manage everything in the enterprise. I've also heard it costs a bunch of get that functionality whereas UniFi is free.
Skip the in between steps to go for the maximum throughput on standard Fiber optic networking. I think it supports 1 Terabit per second, per color, per cable. Certainly the way to go if you can afford that much speed.
I am also dealing with a similar upstairs/downstairs situation. I lucked out. Snagged a Qnap Qhora-301W router for cheap (Amazon “used” but it was new). I’m already sucked into Qnap’s ecosystem, so I’m sticking with them. The router features two 10gbe ports! The router is on the main floor. I haven’t purchased the switches yet, but I’ll have one in the basement and another on the second floor. My setup doesn’t need fiber, just copper. When I buy a new house, I’ll probably switch to fiber. Maybe Qnap’s fiber switches will go down in price by then?
1. AOC is a thing with direct attached fibers and with longer runs. 2. SM is easier choice for the future proofing much longer in the future and for a 300 meter limit. 3. Self made cables is a thing here as well and not that difficult to achieve. 4. Bloody critters are capable of cable damage thus put armored cables to the attic etc.
Excellent vid and very interesting to see your setup and rationale behind it all. You sound like a Brit but talk in dollars and the mains plugs I could see didn't look like those of the UK, so are you based in North America these days?
If I go from the agg switch with transceiver to rj45 cat 6a cable do I need another transceiverat the other end? Or can I just go directly to my pc with rj45?
thanks! Thinking about this subject, my main question is why not SFP28? (using direct links between data hungry clients and NAS, and SFP+ for switches)
Qnap make an 18 port poe++ 2.5gbe switch with dual 10gbe i think. Though its overkill for my needs. I use literally the cheapest Zyxel 2.5 100 dollar 8 port and a port injector for doorbell and iptv camera on couple of the gig ports on router. I dont belive in excessive future proofing as the costs drop continously on netgear gear, power consumption goes down and features and speed increase too fast.
I changed my home network over to 10 gig all internal with fiber and DAC. And then I had plenty of ports on my SFP+ switches, And I was able to aggregate to connections to make a single link of 20Gbps. And then wherever and from my server rack to my wiring closet in the master closet I ran a ubiquiti multi-strand fiber line that has the six fibers, and so I was able to use two of them to send a 20 GB link to the Enterprise 2.5Gbps links to the ports around the house, and I had a old 1Gbps ubiquiti 105 w poe switch that I've had for a few years now and was able to use two more fibers to aggregate a 2gbps link to feed that switch which runs a handful of my ubiquiti cameras outside. Internally five of my rack mount servers have four 10 gig SFP+ ports, So each server has 40Gbps link. Where one server is running true Nas with the NetApp storage shelf with a little over 300 terabytes of space with 26 sas hard drives. And the rest are running ESXi and clustered v center. With all the VM storage hosted on the net app. So the connection between the servers and the NetApp and really anything within my network is incredibly fast If I'm transferring a file between server to server it's like a blink of an eye, if I transfer a massive file from my desktop to my server share it will actually upload that file to the server at 2.5Gbps speed as that's the slowest from my desktop to the server. I remember many years ago when I upgraded from 100 to 1000 and was wondering if it was worth the payoff and sure enough it definitely was, gig items became cheap very fast however the 10 gig stuff is still taking a while and still coming down in price
But now I run ubiquiti products for my entire network. Starting with my UDM SE. And then have multiple 10 gig switches and one gig switches I have a whole lineup of gigabit POE switches that were being used. I have a configured into multiple subnets and multiple VLANs so data is isolated between those items along with SSIDs so they have their own networks
Did you have issues with those fanless 8-port aggregation switches? In my network closet, it was frequently overheating with Mikrotik SFP+ connectors (I didn't use fiber at the time). I ended up switching to the more-expensive 32-port model (which has a built-in fan), and that fixed all my issues no matter the connector. I moved the 8-port model to another room where I'm only using 4 ports and haven't had heat issues since. Only 15 of those 32-ports are in used since SFP connectors don't have PoE, but it's already more than the 8 ports I had before, and I seem to be always finding more places to add Ethernet drops in my house. I've already moved 20 wireless IoT devices onto Ethernet, and will do that to more devices that support it. Ethernet EVERYWHERE!
Lovely video! I wonder if there is any way to stress test an internet connection to see problems like the one you described with the wrong terminations in the cable? Maybe just iperf3 running over night with 10Gig packets?
Iperf3 is one of the tools I used! I saw loads of retries on cat6a cables and coupled that in with smokeping (see my other vid) to get an accurate picture of what was going on.
quick question your internet comes in at 1000mb but you have main link at 1gb then some of your usw at 10gb speed surely you need 10gb all way to point of entry
I’m running 10GbE on my network everywhere and I regularly exceed 2.5GbE. I love it, BUT I was stupid for not laying fiber instead. I could even have my server room with all my PC’s rack mounted and centralized anything I want and had better scalability. I had a team come in for like a week to run it, so I do t want to redo the whole thing,e job 2 years later. Kicking myself.
This is how I feel now having gone fiber. So glad that I did because I know it'll last longer than I need it too for upgrades etc. Performance is superb and has been super reliable all year.
Love the design of your network! I don't mean to be rude, but I felt really justified in my decision to go with SFP+ and Fiber when you were talking about the pain points of 10GbE over copper. 😅 Can't wait to see how your Homelab evolves over time! Subscribed!
Why run 2 SFP+ connection back to the other switch, dont understand the need for 2 when one is enough. also this not cause some sort of loopbakc, do you change a setting on the swtiches to account for this?
In the Unifi software you create an aggregate link which is capable of a failover in the event of a failure. It doubles the number of links so in theory at least two simultaneous 10gig transfers can happen at once with different clients. The primary reason was redundancy. Running cables is a pain and running two is not 100% more work than one so why not?
Just found ur channel excellent video so useful thank you. Just subbed as see few vids I like look of. Can i ask where u get your cables and transceivers from please?
I'd like to connect my main switches with fiber but in a normal UK house its a real challenge to get cables from A-B without breaking them. The cat6 cables I ran went trough absolute trauma to get them into the walls, pulling through internal bends etc. Then if you did manage it, you need to terminate them yourself as you'd never get a pre-terminated SFP connector through the walls
I did this for my mother in law. Easiest solution was to go outside, along the soffet under the gutters and then back in around a window frame where I carefully drilled and siliconed!
10g over copper is hit or miss. I ran cat 6 throughout my 2 story home to the basement. My desktop is connected at 10g to the switch in the basement and Ive had no problems at all. The ethernet runs even cross over all of the power cables coming out of my breaker panel (at 90 degrees).
Great tour Alex! After watching the secret management video, I wonder if you've done any network automation with Ansible? It's quite different than with Linux targets.
Unfortunately not. The infrastructure I use at the moment isn't really conducive to infra as code. I don't know of a way (please tell me if you do) to configure Unifi or Opnsense reliably with these tools. I'm always on the hunt for an opnsense replacement for this reason.
10gig is going to be a big upgrade when we get wifi 7 ap's with 6ghz as well. thats my plan at least. I think unifi needs some switches that support 10gig poe++ though. they have only one currently for 4 or 6 ports (i forget which)
I'm surprised you're good with 10Gb. It wasn't until I setup 25Gb that I finally moved all my files off my main rig and onto my NAS. Before, I only used my NAS as a backup because I was so unsatisfied with the transfer speeds. 25Gb is finally at NVMe speeds with PCIe gen 3. I'm actually running into limitations in my drives now rather than the cable. Also, upgrading everything to jumbo packets for that and my 5Gb Internet seems to have caused issues with some older devices. I left it this way, but I'm aware there are weird issues now for some IoT devices. It's never that simple :/.
Hi I wish to seek some help to upgrade my existing home Unifi networking system to 10g fibre ……if I can contact you somehow and discuss my existing setup I would be grateful. Once I know exactly what gear I need to buy from Unifi - and subsequently the step by step plan to implement the necessary changes I can confidently do this myself. BTW I am just an ordinary person not an expert but very much interested in improving my slow home network. I know it’s important for you to have details of my current setup in order for you to guide me? I am happy to pay for your help. I am not in the US - live in UK
Great stuff.. have been pondering this upgrade for a while, but the whole "your transceivers might work, might not" thing was been holding me back.. I'm already in the unifi eco system with a USW48 with two sfp+ ports, so I may try and dip my toe in 10gig waters.. also read that the fiber cables are more fragile than copper.. what's your experience with that?
I didn’t find it to be much of an issue at all. I treated the fibers with respect and didn’t yank on them and was careful not to kink. They are made of glass after all. It is a consideration but not a massive one tbh. I ran conduit in areas the fibers are exposed to minimize my risk over time.
My experience with fiber patch cables is that they break when you slam them in a door, and when you force-bend them at the connector by having no room between the switch and the switch closet door. You can wind them around a finger just fine. I have ~100 in the infrastructure at work, so we have spare patch cables and spare transceivers. So since we aren't worried about breaking them, we don't treat them with extra care, and none have broken outside of the above causes. It is also how I have ended up with a few at home - If I slam them in the rack door (accidentally! honest!) and they don't break (they usually don't) I replace them anyway, because they are cheap and failures cost time.
I have a netgear xsm7224s 10 Gig switch, 1 Arubra s2500 poe with 4 10 g ports. and 1 Arubra s3500 poe also with 4 10 g ports. the only difference between the 2500 and 3500 is the 3500 has 2 power supplies. All my computers in my office are all 10g. and the run from my shed/office to the home has 2 10g lines witch are connected to the netgear switch the same with the switch in the office POE switch. All 3 switches are enterprise hardware. before I only had 1g but with 32 4k and 8k security cameras the 1g was starting to bog down now I don't even know the POE cameras are on the network. I have some of those 10g T transceivers, and I have bought different one and not of my switches support them. I believe its because they take more power than the fiber and the switches wont power them.
TP-Link have a 16 port semi-managed PoE switch for $199 (TL-SG1218MPE), with double the power budget (around 200W total)... Is the USW-24-POE really worth nearly double the price? TP-Link also have the ER8411 router for $350, which has two 10Gbps SFP+ ports and eight 1Gbps ports. I'm using it with 10Gbps internet and it works really well. I don't think Unifi have anything around the same price with the same performance.
You're not wrong! Whether these things are worth their prices is entirely up to you, your needs and your budget. I've been extremely happy with the Unifi ecosystem myself so I stuck with what I knew. I could/should get some Omada gear in for testing though!
Telling people that you can't terminate your own fiber is inaccurate. A package of 10 mechanical connectors is about $15. A kit of all all the tools necessary to do it right including a cleaver, light meter and visual fault locator is about $100. All my connections ended up being 0.5db loss (or less). I have 6 fiber spans going to separate garage/home office a couple of hundred feet away. Instead of buying an expensive FIU (Fiber Interface Unit) I adapted a $5 Tupperware container (at least it's dust proof :)
Nice video, love the detailed explanations! I'm not sure if it's just me or not, but it seems like the audio and video are just ever so slightly out of sync.
I don't understand why 10 gig wasn't the default for home networks 5 years ago. With single NVME drives capable of saturating 10 gig already, if I had the cash, I'd skip 10 gig and go straight to 25 or even 100 for my main machines anyway. 1 gig is sufficient for almost every other client in the house as gigabit internet is crazy expensive around me still. And frankly, even if we had multigig internet, most of the clients don't really need that much speed anyway.
Since funds are tight, I'm looking at the Mikrotik crs305_1g_4s_in. Ultimately, I just need my main machine and network storage on 10 gig right now so the css610_8g_2s_in is probably a better option so I don't need to cascade the 10 gig on the current 5 port 1 gig to have more than the single copper gigabit port. It's just that the 4 port would allow me to have more 10 gig in the future so I consider it.
Some ways to save money:
- Use cheaper OM3 instead of OM4, you can still do 100 gigabit at 100 meters over OM3, more than enough for home use. OM4 is overkill.
- Use copper or fiber SFP+ DACs instead of OM3/10GBASE-SR where applicable. Think of DACs as the SFP+ modules and the cable integrated into a single assembly. They're usually cheaper, especially for short runs like a switch to a device in the same room or same rack.
- Look into cheaper switches from companies like MikroTik instead of Ubiquiti, you can save hundreds if you do that and right-size the switches.
- Shop around for all this. Understand the price of SFP+ modules and OM3 cables from different vendors to make sure you're not overpaying. For example, Ubiquiti charges $38 for a pair of SFP+ modules, but you can get a pair of equivalent 10GTek on Amazon for $30, and I've seen them even cheaper elsewhere. Do pay attention to advertised compatibility though.
Some caveats or other random notes to consider:
- Don't rely on RJ45 SFP+ modules unless you can't avoid it. They run very hot (enough to burn you) because they draw more power than fiber modules, may overheat passively cooled switches if you put too many in one switch, and are limited to 30 meters at 10 gigabit (because they can't get enough power in SFP+ to go farther).
- You can get coupling RJ45 keystone jacks too, you don't have to wire the ethernet cable to the keystone jack if you don't want to. I did some ethernet through a wall between rooms and just used a few thin pre-terminated one foot long cat6 cables between the keystones.
- If you're installing LC connector fiber keystones in a wall, pay close attention to the boot length of the fiber cable you're putting inside the wall! Most walls and keystone jacks won't have enough space between the two sheets of drywall to fit a normal LC connector fiber cable (not without a nasty bend), so buy short-boot LC connector cables for this use case.
- Any time you're putting cables in/through walls/ceilings/etc, make sure you get cables that are appropriately rated for this. Riser/CMR/OFNR for in-wall, plenum/CMP/OFNP for in floors/ceilings/ventilation/etc, with plenum/CMP/OFNP being the better rating (still good for in-wall). This is all about fire safety. You might think none of this matters, until there's a fire and the maybe the cables you ran through a ceiling shorted against something and started the fire, or maybe their insulation jacket was flammable and let the fire spread much faster through your house by bypassing fire breaks like walls and doors.
Have you used MikroTik much? How robust are these in the long run?
Mikrotik probably has the best value in the market. The only downside : you need to be very knowledgeable to do a proper configuration.
I would go for Mikrotek immediately if support would be affordable...
Most people won't read all that bro
Thanks for sharing your network knowledge. I'm researching this kind of product for my home network system. Is ubiquiti better than tp-link omada?
Dude, you hit it out of the park with this comment!
I bought a spool of 1,000 ft of OM4. For about $300 I bought the supplies (Jonard fiber stripper, cleaver, AFL LC FastConnect) to learn how terminate my own fiber. I don't work with twisted pair a ton but am comfortable putting on RJ-45 and punching down keystones.
On my first attempt with putting fiber ends on I got a light/signal and was capable of connecting. I went through about three LC connectors before getting a couple tips that made it easier and cleaner (likely for better quality connections).
Point being that for not that much money and a little bit of time and focus you too can terminate multi- or singlemode fiber. Both are the same technique and dimensions when you get down to the 125um cladding. The AFL FastConnect OM4 (Laser Optimized) LC connectors are about US$75 a six-pack and the OM4 fiber was about $300 for 1,000 ft.
If you have any interest I'd be glad to give you the links to what I bought or the tips for terminating. A few hundred bucks and two hours time you'll be terminating like you're Lenny Lightwave! Even though premade is so much easier I wanted to nerd out and learn the skill. Have about 10 fiber runs in my house now including 25GbE to a couple computers.
yep i bought a kit for 50 USD in thailand included cleaver, optical power meter, test illuminator a bag and stuff GREAT and my local fibre guys donated to me 1km of new cable with catenary in it for a bottle of whiskey (3USD) But this is AMAZING THAILAND be careful you dont get fibres in your fingers or worse!!! Do it in the yard..
Share the links anyway - I'm sure I'm not the only one who's interested in the tools you picked up.
OM3 cables are dirt-cheap on Amazon, does it really make sense to terminate your own? Cat5 is easy, but fiber is a whole different ball game.
@@DerekDavis213 It makes almost no sense! I used OM4 but just wanted to learn the skill and wasn’t sure of how many runs I was going to put in or the length, but I agree, kinda impractical although not that difficult either. But yeah, for a couple runs, just buy premade.
@@CompletelyLawless I have made many Cat5e patch cables myself. I can terminate one end of that cable in about 1 minute. I have an AMP crimper and use AMP/Tyco plugs with load bars.
How long does it take to properly terminate and polish two LC connectors on one side of the OM4 cable?
Every DC I’ve worked in has layers of daisy chained switches. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it. As long as you have sufficient bandwidth cross linking them and you lay out you clients to minimised chatter across those links. Putting your network storage on the switch with clients most likely to be doing large transfers to them keeps more of the data on the backplane and off the wire.
Technically yes but it introduces sort of a single point of failure too. Say your whole network goes down you need to figure out which switch is actually causing the problem.
If you have an agg and the whole network goes down you know it’s the agg
I agree for smaller installations. I tried to fix a setup in a larger student dorm were the second switch stopped working. There were 4 more switches behind it, so there way more affected people than necessary. The sad part was that the uplinks were 1gbit, so chaining them was not a smart idea from the beginning. Having an aggregation switch improved the situation a lot.
@@dukeseb that’s true, more devices increases your chance of an outage to at least part of the network. The nice thing about setups like ubiquity or Omada is they have basic monitoring out of the box which takes some of the guesswork out of network diagnostics.
@@dukeseb Management systems/software fixes this issue. And if you have a large enough home lab, you have dual core switches, edge switches, etc. And they are all "plugged together," using proper trunking. I get notified of a broken port, broken switch (heck even a broken fan) in seconds. I can choose what to do about it when I need to. IP cameras make this redundancy hard, but still manageable.
@@dukeseb murphy's laws - If it can go wrong IT WILL - and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link!
I didn't realize who I was going to watch when I clicked on this but the moment I heard your voice I knew exactly who you are. Edgerly waiting for the next episode of self hosted
10G upgrade added to the ever growing self-hosted Kanban board titled "Cool shit to try". Thanks for the vid!
What else is on the list?
@@ktzsystems Grafana Loki, Audiobookshelf, Tdarr, Mycroft/Almond/Genie/Ada, Ventoy, Grocy, OpenStack, VyOS, the list goes on and on :)
@@ElliotWeishaar Audiobookshelf is really great and I host it for several of my family members using Tailscale. VyOS is on my list for sure as a potential declarative configuration based replacement for Opnsense.
You can't just say "there is a list" and not say what is on it! :)
10GBASE-T is amazing and annoying at the same time: It runs with really sophisticated line coding, right up against the shannon limit of the cable. That makes it power hungry, and very sensitive to non-perfect termination and connector contact. Combine that with mechanical compromises made in a cat6(a) connector in order to get the bandwidth in an 8P8C connector, and you get why I no longer use it where I have a patch panel in the path.
Your network diagram looks like RSTP is next on the list of things to try - Then you could have unplugged the DAC cables without disturbing the video watchers.
And finally, congratulations on now having error counters on all ports. Life is hard enough without them :-)
I found the connectors for cat7 way easier to handle. They are more expensive, but you don't need special tools for them. I use them with cat 6 coupler keystones and never had an issue with them. I get a bit over 900mbit till the RAM Cache of my NAS is full. Going with couplers is not really recommend best practice - but for your Home Lab, it can be a valid choice.
Great Video Alex. I love seeing other's network layouts and hardware. Love how you took the time to go through it all in detail.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I'm a Network + certified but I have to admit: I'm a little intimidated with fiber. I've never worked with fiber. I'm feeling better now after your extremely good video. Thanks a lot!
I like your custom plywood server rack, that's brilliant. I also like your advice on using a keystone patch panel for easier customization. You're a genius man.
I just upgraded to 2.5gbe, it came on pc, it came on my router, a switch was very cheap and so was a dongle for my NAS. I am very happy with it. 10gbe can wait.
Nice upgrade! I think folks getting NICs in the motherboards with 2.5gbe built-in will sell a lot of networking gear.
@@ktzsystems DSM 7.1 has beta SMB Multichannel support, so I will try a cheap second nic for my pc and second dongle for the nas this summer for 5gbe ( or near enough) my ancient cat5a will last me a long time yet.Nearly everything else is connected to my Netgear Nighthawk 120 on 5GHz WiFi.
If it's included that's great. But realistically it's still too slow since an SSD can outperform it. Any modern HDD can hit 2Gb or so. Lot's of internet providers are already rolling out multigig internet making the 2.5Gb the restriction
@@mrmotofy Precisely why i went 10GbE. With EPON, my ISP gives me "up to" 8gb download and i am constantly bumping against the LAN 2.5gb limit. First world problem really it's super fast already but hey, why not enjoy the full bandwidth if the neighbors don't use it? :)
While the Unifi Aggregation switch shows 10GbE as the negotiated speed, I have successfully connected 2.5GbE and 5 GbE devices to it using a 10GBase-T SFP+ to RJ-45 transceiver. They functioned perfectly at those speeds with no issues. The devices themselves properly reported 2.5Gb and 5Gb on their interfaces.
HUH. Well now you’ve got me curiouser than a curious thing. I shall have to try that out.
Found the same, it's dependant on the SFP+ to Ethernet module you use, some do it, some don't. The switch sees the 10G connection to the module, the module then does the negotiation with the client. I use 10GTEK SFP+ to ethernet modules, and they do that. I also use their fibre modules between my Unifi switches (USW-Agg, USW-24-POE and USW-Pro-24-POE).
you just persueaded me to get surplus UNIFY here in Thailand as its cheap
I've done this too for a cheaper upgrade to my Dell Micro server. I bought a trendnet USB 2.5 ethernet adapter and ran it to my USW-Agg on copper with a 10Gtek transceiver worked. The transceiver is doing the autonegotiation _I think_ because the Agg switch shows 10GbE and it works. for the 3 x $80 on cabling, USB adapters, and transceiver it was just barely cheaper than the 10GbE mini switch from ubiquiti though so.. weigh your options I guess.
this is exactly what I am trying to do at home. I dont have as many devices currently, but future proofing is wise as well. great video
Hi, awesome video! A a little correction from my side: With some SFP Module you are capable of using 2.5gbE wit hthe USW-Aggregation. The Module will Negotiate 10gbE with the Module, but the Module will Negotiate 2.5 with the Network Device. The 10Gtek ASF-10G-T is one of those capable of doing that. here is a quote from the Unifi Forums: "The 10Gtek ASF-10G-T is autonegotiating the 10g connection on the SFP+ side and the 2.5G connection on the RJ45 side."
soooo that's why i was seeing 10G on the mikrotik on 2,5G uplinks.. thanks for the info :p
fwiw, Unifi's SFP+ to RJ45 adapter is supposed to support SFP+ to 1/2.5/5/10 GbE, part no UACC-CM-RJ45-MG. $65 USD. I have not tried this yet, but intend to use this transceiver between the Netgate/pfSense 4200 router RJ-45, 2.5GbE port to the Unifi 10GbE Agg switch or directly to the downstream switch SFP+ port.
I'm a huge fan of the "Self Hosted" podcast and loved this video. Keep up the good work!
"Cognitive load of maintaining hardware" -- well said Sir, I am stealing this!
This video is brilliant for any aspiring UniFi enthusiast!
I run 10gbe copper at home for ~18m, but my cable is the very expensive Nexans cat6a, then the cable is terminated with cat6 keystones and then using 1m cat6a patch cables to the devices
for short runs use passive DACs, they use a whole lot less power, don't need SFP/+ modules and they have much lower latency than fiber
The shorter the cable is, the less the cat standard matters. You can easily run Cat 6a or 7 through your house and use a thin, badly shielded but highly flexible cable from the patch panel to the switches. That makes life easier.
Extremely useful video. The way that you explain things is calm and I really like it that way. Even someone with some experience in networking like me enjoyed these simple explanations which means that they are truly great!
You're very kind!
I watched your videos and feel your you are the right person to guide me with my bespoke setup all it’s are Unifi products
So well summarised with so much individual information. Thank you very much for this great explanation.
Glad it was helpful!
Great video.. I've been on the fence about going 2.5gbe vs all the way to 10g and your video really helped make sense of it all. Your presentation style is impeccable.
Excellent video! I likened this to a well done lecture at university. I subscribed!!
There is 0 reason not to do 10gb. Great video.
Thanks for this video I am learning how to get 10g in my home networks .
25:00 the factory does not clean the fibers. You need to clean them yourself. From the factory there are particles of stuff on it. I scope them everyday at work. They usually work ok without cleaning, but they are not clean. When i clean them i get a better lite reading.
Yes, but most people don't have OTDR, just wiping over your your pants is enough to remove the dust
@@habana7638 Actually you are making it worse, but it will still work unless its really bad. Your better off with alcohol wipes.
@@Starlite123 Of course it's little better, but I've never seen anyone do that in all the DCs I've worked in for the last 30 years, if the fiber is already damaged cleaning doesn't help anyway and they don't damage that quickly.
Thank you for a very informative video! Tech, clearly explained Ina user-friendly manner. The bar has been set! I am chomping at the bit while our cable guys take our neighborhood from FTTN to FTTH this summer. This video will help me to get ready internally..Thanks again!
I segmented my house into two halves as well, the top and bottom floors are linked with a single SFP+ fiber cable from UI. USW-24-pro poe up stairs and down.
It’s such a logical way to do it!! Glad I’m not the only one.
@@ktzsystems I chose the ubiquiti one that already has the fiber attached. What I’m slightly concerned about is one of the transceivers going bad and having to replace the entire cable somehow which isn’t possible because we already fixed all the drywall.
@@MagMan4x4 Do you mean direct attach?
@@ktzsystems yeah but they aren’t the copper ones, they are the green UI fiber SFP+ ones.
@@MagMan4x4 Ah yeah... You might have been safer going for a transceiver / om4 combo there but YOLO!
Nice video, I’ve been using the udm max and 16poe switch with 10gb green nas and it’s all wonderful. Been looking to fiber for a long run from the workshop(where the server resides) to the house in the future, nice to know I’m almost ready to go with a couple of transceivers. Be interesting if we see more small switches that mix SFP+ with rj45 for those satellite breakout areas. Thanks again for adding clarity to the fiber options.
Wow, MM, it's alive! in 14 years working in Telecom I've seen and used it once only :).
MM?
On Cat.6A cables, 10gbit dropout is always from two of these: 1. not using a very good termination on your keystone and even not using a keystone at all. 2. bends on the cable at an angle of 90 or less, that will destroy the data in your cable.
Thank you for your video. I appreciate you sharing what worked, what didn't and why. I am starting to setup a 10g network in my home and I will be using some Unifi products.
Yep! Spotted the easter egg :). Tremendously informative video! Thanks.
I love the video, the way you explain and talk thru all the elements, the reasoning behind, the editing! Amazing :) At home we have everything on the basement but for that we needed to extend all the CAT6 cables that where terminated in the ground floor (aka female keystone to a new cable going to the main networking/servers rack) plus run some CAT6A additional ones. That was a lot of work haha. Some of the CAT6A connect to an USW Aggregation using RJ45 SFP+ transceivers but I'm still questioning if we should have ran OM4 like you did instead for the devices that are 10G and are not in the basement.
If it works it works. Long term the OM4 will be a better bet though! Thanks for your kind words about the video.
Loved the video. The pace, content, and video all worked well. I also liked your cadence and how you explained things. Finally, I saw the Easter egg!
Yes!!!! Finally someone saw it! Awesome.
Great video. I work in a technology role and I still feel like I walked away learning something!
I wonder how long it will be where PON style fibre 10G-PON with just one strand will be a standard. It is very cheap to run with connector small enough to fit in the existing conduit. I could literally pull my cat5a out and pull the fibre in.
The switch in my home network is an Aruba S2500 POE+. It has 4 SFP+ 10G ports and 48 POE+ 1g ports. (I got it used on ebay for dirt cheap) I only have 4 wired devises on my network. They include my work station, my media server, my Blue Iris server, and unused 10g port saved for an unfinished build. Everything else is either a POE powered security camera or a wireless device. It all fits in my 25U rack. Even my workstation is in my rack. Its all nice and tidy, meets my needs and works. Once I learn how to fully use a layer 3 managed switch, I plan to use vlans to segment my network. The wireless stuff together, my security cameras together, and any future IOT stuff I may start messing about with will be together. I have a lot to still learn but its a fun hobby.
That looks like a kickass switch! What's the power draw / noise levels like?
@@ktzsystems It has 48 POE+ ports so the power draw is probably up there. Its certainly not silent but I can't hear it above the window mounted AC unit when the air is one in my office.
i have started out with 1 gig to my mancave and when i went all out on unifi, i added 10gb fibre to my mancave, which is about 10-15m away from the house
Great video , I've just joined the cult of ubiquiti the last few month and I'm slowly upgrading , people who say to just use a single switch and don't daisy chain have never retro fitted networking in a house ?
Most of my gear is upstairs so starting with my 10g there , my gear is a ultra router , to a 8 port poe switch , which gives me 3 camera + a AP with a trunk upstairs to a 16 pro max switch , with 2 trunks one to loft a 8 port poe with 2 cameras and a AP and the other to the garage to 8 port poe 1 camera and 1 AP.
I need a faster way to get from downstairs to upstairs which is limited to 1 gb .
I wish the Flex 10 GbE had a SFP+ port so I could use a SFP+ port from upstairs to downstairs , going from SFP+ to RJ45 is stupidly expensive and cheap to other way around.
so i just bought a house, and while i dont expect internerspeeds in my rural area to get above teh 1gb speed i have now i did future proof abit, im using a UDM-PRO as my base, (thought about opnsense but it kept crashing and dropping same iwth pf sense couldnt get them to be stable), anyway i have 3 bedrooms on main floor with living room kitchen, 2 offices in basement and a living room, each room in the house has 1 dedicated cat6 and 1 poe dedicated cat 6, as well as a conduit for future runs, in my attic i just ran 4 pairs of om4 fibre as i plan on having a unifi poe switch there for cameras and 2 building to building bridges, 1 that goes to my garage and 1 that will go to a greenhouse im building in the back of my property, each will house a 24 port poe switch but probably just like 8poe 16 not poe, :D great video gave me alot to think about for future fibre runs in the house, i apologize for my spelling i see alot of red lines lol
Then my work here is done. My goal was to provoke thoughts for others during their various planning phases.
Good luck with the build outs.
@@ktzsystems so I have decided to run 2 pair om4 to my attic where I’m putting a poe switch and also 2 pair to my garage underground using half inch conduit 1 foot deep you gave me a lot to think about and the cost is not a issue compared to the amount of runs I need of cat 6
I don't know that I'd call that daisy chaining. The whole purpose of the aggregation switch is connecting switches together, so connecting one aggregation switch to another one seems pretty normal. It just sucks that the cheap one is a layer 2 switch.
Cat 6a cable can easily go 10g for 100m. The thing is that most Cat 6a connections use normal rj45 jacks that are crimped with normal Cat 5e or Cat 6 crimpers. Although this will pass the 8 pair connectivity tester, they will fail miserably on the Fluke test! To get your Cat 6a connections to work properly you have to use a Cat 6a keystone jack and then connect that to a Cat 6a certified patch cable. Alternatively just get the Telegartner MFP8 field connectors (or something similar) and connect directly one end to the other. If you do that, your Cat 6A connection will easily go even 40G if for only 100 feet. If Cat 6A cable is not using properly terminated connections ... you will actually have less performance than Cat 5e connections as the Cat 6A cable has heavy shielding which can work against you by propagating interference.
Thank you for the very stimulating video. I currently use 2 TP-Link Stackable JetStream 24-port Gigabit T1700G-28TQ Smart Switches, each with 4 SFP+ ports. I installed 10GbE SPF+ cards in the servers (Proxmox, Truenas, Backup) and an Asus XG-C100C 10GbE RJ45 card in the clients. Firewall is an OPNsense - works!
Can you also say why you don't use a Unifi firewal in addition to the Unifi switches instead of OPNsense?
Thanks for the demo and info, I appreciate you sharing the network layout. I have three Mikrotik CSS326-24G-2S+RM 24 port Gigabit Ethernet switch with two SFP+ ports that tie my garage, computer room, and living room. But looking at your setup, I guess I should put the Unifi Aggregation switch in the middle, making it a star, since I was just daily chaining them at this time with a 10GBase-T SFP+ to RJ-45 Transceiver
Thx for this video.. how would you fiber wire up devices like smart tvs?
The last "mile" would be copper into a SFP transceiver. But more likely you'd have a switch with a couple of SFP+ ports and half a dozen standard gigabit ethernet jacks.
Super helpful video with spot on the right amount of information, thank you so much for putting this together! Also the network diagram helped a lot!
@KTZ Systems Did you mean to say "cat5e" instead of "cat6a" when describing your cabling issues? I just ran full cat6a (~3000 feet of cat6a that is as thick as quad-shielded coax and is hard to work with when running through the installation holes when at scale of ten or more cables.) for my cameras, and drops for rooms. I did this work last year throughout my home and the cable you just showed in your reference is not cat6a at timestamp 10:47 . (Where is the shielding and the cable overall diameter looks more like regular cat6 or cat5e). I have 120ft runs from my basement to my attic and upper level devices and everything is solid. However, this is now irrelevant because you have already invested in fiber to your problem is now solved.).
When I was taking a random networking class around 2006, the enterprise gear was all CLI and no unified management. And that's what it was like all around town I was told since those companies provided the Cisco gear we were working with in the lab at school. I'm actually surprised it's normal now to centrally manage everything in the enterprise. I've also heard it costs a bunch of get that functionality whereas UniFi is free.
Loved the video. Thank You. Gonna start using Fiber soon too.
Skip the in between steps to go for the maximum throughput on standard Fiber optic networking. I think it supports 1 Terabit per second, per color, per cable. Certainly the way to go if you can afford that much speed.
How did you create the custom login banner for morpheus @5:00 in the video?
Figurine. See other comments for link
I am also dealing with a similar upstairs/downstairs situation. I lucked out. Snagged a Qnap Qhora-301W router for cheap (Amazon “used” but it was new). I’m already sucked into Qnap’s ecosystem, so I’m sticking with them. The router features two 10gbe ports! The router is on the main floor. I haven’t purchased the switches yet, but I’ll have one in the basement and another on the second floor. My setup doesn’t need fiber, just copper. When I buy a new house, I’ll probably switch to fiber. Maybe Qnap’s fiber switches will go down in price by then?
Wow, I love your video. Very detailed and good to follow along with. Thanks.
Great video, just ordered the cable tester using your link :D
1. AOC is a thing with direct attached fibers and with longer runs. 2. SM is easier choice for the future proofing much longer in the future and for a 300 meter limit. 3. Self made cables is a thing here as well and not that difficult to achieve. 4. Bloody critters are capable of cable damage thus put armored cables to the attic etc.
Great, what am I going to do with this 1000' spool of CAT6a now that you've convinced me to move to 10g fiber.
tie it to a tin can on each end and shout really loud
Thanks man! .. regards from Lima, Perú
Excellent vid and very interesting to see your setup and rationale behind it all. You sound like a Brit but talk in dollars and the mains plugs I could see didn't look like those of the UK, so are you based in North America these days?
If I go from the agg switch with transceiver to rj45 cat 6a cable do I need another transceiverat the other end? Or can I just go directly to my pc with rj45?
thanks!
Thinking about this subject, my main question is why not SFP28? (using direct links between data hungry clients and NAS, and SFP+ for switches)
Just moves the bottleneck around! And cost.
USW Enterprise 8 PoE is a nice compromise. I wish UI would introduce more 2.5Gb switches.
Agree. But stock levels have been so inconsistent for the last while it's been near impossible to get one.
Qnap make an 18 port poe++ 2.5gbe switch with dual 10gbe i think. Though its overkill for my needs. I use literally the cheapest Zyxel 2.5 100 dollar 8 port and a port injector for doorbell and iptv camera on couple of the gig ports on router. I dont belive in excessive future proofing as the costs drop continously on netgear gear, power consumption goes down and features and speed increase too fast.
I changed my home network over to 10 gig all internal with fiber and DAC. And then I had plenty of ports on my SFP+ switches, And I was able to aggregate to connections to make a single link of 20Gbps. And then wherever and from my server rack to my wiring closet in the master closet I ran a ubiquiti multi-strand fiber line that has the six fibers, and so I was able to use two of them to send a 20 GB link to the Enterprise 2.5Gbps links to the ports around the house, and I had a old 1Gbps ubiquiti 105 w poe switch that I've had for a few years now and was able to use two more fibers to aggregate a 2gbps link to feed that switch which runs a handful of my ubiquiti cameras outside. Internally five of my rack mount servers have four 10 gig SFP+ ports, So each server has 40Gbps link. Where one server is running true Nas with the NetApp storage shelf with a little over 300 terabytes of space with 26 sas hard drives. And the rest are running ESXi and clustered v center. With all the VM storage hosted on the net app. So the connection between the servers and the NetApp and really anything within my network is incredibly fast If I'm transferring a file between server to server it's like a blink of an eye, if I transfer a massive file from my desktop to my server share it will actually upload that file to the server at 2.5Gbps speed as that's the slowest from my desktop to the server.
I remember many years ago when I upgraded from 100 to 1000 and was wondering if it was worth the payoff and sure enough it definitely was, gig items became cheap very fast however the 10 gig stuff is still taking a while and still coming down in price
But now I run ubiquiti products for my entire network. Starting with my UDM SE. And then have multiple 10 gig switches and one gig switches I have a whole lineup of gigabit POE switches that were being used. I have a configured into multiple subnets and multiple VLANs so data is isolated between those items along with SSIDs so they have their own networks
Did you have issues with those fanless 8-port aggregation switches? In my network closet, it was frequently overheating with Mikrotik SFP+ connectors (I didn't use fiber at the time). I ended up switching to the more-expensive 32-port model (which has a built-in fan), and that fixed all my issues no matter the connector. I moved the 8-port model to another room where I'm only using 4 ports and haven't had heat issues since. Only 15 of those 32-ports are in used since SFP connectors don't have PoE, but it's already more than the 8 ports I had before, and I seem to be always finding more places to add Ethernet drops in my house. I've already moved 20 wireless IoT devices onto Ethernet, and will do that to more devices that support it. Ethernet EVERYWHERE!
Thankfully not. All good for over a year.
Lovely video!
I wonder if there is any way to stress test an internet connection to see problems like the one you described with the wrong terminations in the cable?
Maybe just iperf3 running over night with 10Gig packets?
Iperf3 is one of the tools I used! I saw loads of retries on cat6a cables and coupled that in with smokeping (see my other vid) to get an accurate picture of what was going on.
quick question your internet comes in at 1000mb but you have main link at 1gb then some of your usw at 10gb speed surely you need 10gb all way to point of entry
very helpful and well explained, thanks
I’m running 10GbE on my network everywhere and I regularly exceed 2.5GbE. I love it, BUT I was stupid for not laying fiber instead. I could even have my server room with all my PC’s rack mounted and centralized anything I want and had better scalability. I had a team come in for like a week to run it, so I do t want to redo the whole thing,e job 2 years later. Kicking myself.
This is how I feel now having gone fiber. So glad that I did because I know it'll last longer than I need it too for upgrades etc. Performance is superb and has been super reliable all year.
In a normal home, maybe one 24-port PoE gigabit switch with an SFP port, and the 8-port USW Aggregation switch for 10gig ports.
Love the design of your network! I don't mean to be rude, but I felt really justified in my decision to go with SFP+ and Fiber when you were talking about the pain points of 10GbE over copper. 😅
Can't wait to see how your Homelab evolves over time! Subscribed!
Excuse me, Unifi ppoe switch is good a lot traffic devices cctv right? Sir
Why run 2 SFP+ connection back to the other switch, dont understand the need for 2 when one is enough. also this not cause some sort of loopbakc, do you change a setting on the swtiches to account for this?
In the Unifi software you create an aggregate link which is capable of a failover in the event of a failure.
It doubles the number of links so in theory at least two simultaneous 10gig transfers can happen at once with different clients.
The primary reason was redundancy. Running cables is a pain and running two is not 100% more work than one so why not?
Why don't you use the cloudkey to host?
Just found ur channel excellent video so useful thank you. Just subbed as see few vids I like look of. Can i ask where u get your cables and transceivers from please?
A mixture of direct from UniFi, fs.com and Amazon.
@@ktzsystems thank you
Very nice presentation 👍
Outstanding video. Thank you.
I'd like to connect my main switches with fiber but in a normal UK house its a real challenge to get cables from A-B without breaking them. The cat6 cables I ran went trough absolute trauma to get them into the walls, pulling through internal bends etc. Then if you did manage it, you need to terminate them yourself as you'd never get a pre-terminated SFP connector through the walls
I did this for my mother in law. Easiest solution was to go outside, along the soffet under the gutters and then back in around a window frame where I carefully drilled and siliconed!
@@ktzsystems I'd never forgive myself if the cable were visible.
I've realised engineering is about making the most overkill shit in your free time 💪
10g over copper is hit or miss. I ran cat 6 throughout my 2 story home to the basement. My desktop is connected at 10g to the switch in the basement and Ive had no problems at all. The ethernet runs even cross over all of the power cables coming out of my breaker panel (at 90 degrees).
Great tour Alex! After watching the secret management video, I wonder if you've done any network automation with Ansible? It's quite different than with Linux targets.
Unfortunately not. The infrastructure I use at the moment isn't really conducive to infra as code. I don't know of a way (please tell me if you do) to configure Unifi or Opnsense reliably with these tools.
I'm always on the hunt for an opnsense replacement for this reason.
@@ktzsystems OpnSense and pfSense can be configured with Ansible. It's possible to configure a lot of Unifi (switches) with Ansible, too.
10gig is going to be a big upgrade when we get wifi 7 ap's with 6ghz as well. thats my plan at least. I think unifi needs some switches that support 10gig poe++ though. they have only one currently for 4 or 6 ports (i forget which)
Hello
I wish to go Fibre 10gb home upgrade from Ethernet network - all my gear is Unifi already ……I need help plan
I'm surprised you're good with 10Gb. It wasn't until I setup 25Gb that I finally moved all my files off my main rig and onto my NAS. Before, I only used my NAS as a backup because I was so unsatisfied with the transfer speeds. 25Gb is finally at NVMe speeds with PCIe gen 3. I'm actually running into limitations in my drives now rather than the cable. Also, upgrading everything to jumbo packets for that and my 5Gb Internet seems to have caused issues with some older devices. I left it this way, but I'm aware there are weird issues now for some IoT devices. It's never that simple :/.
Great video! Subscribed
Hi I wish to seek some help to upgrade my existing home Unifi networking system to 10g fibre ……if I can contact you somehow and discuss my existing setup I would be grateful.
Once I know exactly what gear I need to buy from Unifi - and subsequently the step by step plan to implement the necessary changes I can confidently do this myself. BTW I am just an ordinary person not an expert but very much interested in improving my slow home network.
I know it’s important for you to have details of my current setup in order for you to guide me? I am happy to pay for your help.
I am not in the US - live in UK
Great stuff.. have been pondering this upgrade for a while, but the whole "your transceivers might work, might not" thing was been holding me back.. I'm already in the unifi eco system with a USW48 with two sfp+ ports, so I may try and dip my toe in 10gig waters.. also read that the fiber cables are more fragile than copper.. what's your experience with that?
I didn’t find it to be much of an issue at all. I treated the fibers with respect and didn’t yank on them and was careful not to kink. They are made of glass after all.
It is a consideration but not a massive one tbh. I ran conduit in areas the fibers are exposed to minimize my risk over time.
My experience with fiber patch cables is that they break when you slam them in a door, and when you force-bend them at the connector by having no room between the switch and the switch closet door. You can wind them around a finger just fine.
I have ~100 in the infrastructure at work, so we have spare patch cables and spare transceivers. So since we aren't worried about breaking them, we don't treat them with extra care, and none have broken outside of the above causes. It is also how I have ended up with a few at home - If I slam them in the rack door (accidentally! honest!) and they don't break (they usually don't) I replace them anyway, because they are cheap and failures cost time.
@@kkpdk Great insight!
Most of the fiber cables these days are very robust. They can be tied in knots with videos showing it in action.
You must live up north somewhere, if you tried the attic setup somewhere in the south the servers wouldn't be too happy in 140+ degree temps.
I’m in a North. North Carolina which is south of what folks consider the north.
I have a netgear xsm7224s 10 Gig switch, 1 Arubra s2500 poe with 4 10 g ports. and 1 Arubra s3500 poe also with 4 10 g ports. the only difference between the 2500 and 3500 is the 3500 has 2 power supplies. All my computers in my office are all 10g. and the run from my shed/office to the home has 2 10g lines witch are connected to the netgear switch the same with the switch in the office POE switch. All 3 switches are enterprise hardware. before I only had 1g but with 32 4k and 8k security cameras the 1g was starting to bog down now I don't even know the POE cameras are on the network. I have some of those 10g T transceivers, and I have bought different one and not of my switches support them. I believe its because they take more power than the fiber and the switches wont power them.
this was fun to watch in the background while doing other things.
btw bill gates said 64K ;)
And how right he was!!
TP-Link have a 16 port semi-managed PoE switch for $199 (TL-SG1218MPE), with double the power budget (around 200W total)... Is the USW-24-POE really worth nearly double the price?
TP-Link also have the ER8411 router for $350, which has two 10Gbps SFP+ ports and eight 1Gbps ports. I'm using it with 10Gbps internet and it works really well. I don't think Unifi have anything around the same price with the same performance.
You're not wrong! Whether these things are worth their prices is entirely up to you, your needs and your budget. I've been extremely happy with the Unifi ecosystem myself so I stuck with what I knew. I could/should get some Omada gear in for testing though!
do something like caft computing 100g upgrade - worth it - you don't need the switch either #single mode #multimode
Do it. Do it. Do it.
This was super interesting.
Oh awesome you have a TH-cam now :)
I do?
Telling people that you can't terminate your own fiber is inaccurate. A package of 10 mechanical connectors is about $15. A kit of all all the tools necessary to do it right including a cleaver, light meter and visual fault locator is about $100. All my connections ended up being 0.5db loss (or less). I have 6 fiber spans going to separate garage/home office a couple of hundred feet away. Instead of buying an expensive FIU (Fiber Interface Unit) I adapted a $5 Tupperware container (at least it's dust proof :)
we're so used to say ethernet cable for RJ45 that we forget DACs are also ethernet.. Fiber is also ethernet.. it's going to trigger some hehe
My PFSense Box just died after 2 years, soooooooooo Deam Machine Time, I know your feeling.
Thank you.
Me hose happy with gigabit local speeds and 300mbits sppeds from ISP
Nice video, love the detailed explanations!
I'm not sure if it's just me or not, but it seems like the audio and video are just ever so slightly out of sync.
Is that just in one spot?
@@ktzsystems Consistently desynced for the whole video for me. As I said, not by much just enough for me to notice.
@@ob2522 I’ll be curious if your comment is the only one. I don’t notice it tbh!
Fyi -Sync is good here on 4G
Seems like it's just me! As you were, carry on with the great content! :)
I don't understand why 10 gig wasn't the default for home networks 5 years ago. With single NVME drives capable of saturating 10 gig already, if I had the cash, I'd skip 10 gig and go straight to 25 or even 100 for my main machines anyway. 1 gig is sufficient for almost every other client in the house as gigabit internet is crazy expensive around me still. And frankly, even if we had multigig internet, most of the clients don't really need that much speed anyway.
Since funds are tight, I'm looking at the Mikrotik crs305_1g_4s_in. Ultimately, I just need my main machine and network storage on 10 gig right now so the css610_8g_2s_in is probably a better option so I don't need to cascade the 10 gig on the current 5 port 1 gig to have more than the single copper gigabit port. It's just that the 4 port would allow me to have more 10 gig in the future so I consider it.
Good video sir !