Last month, when I was writing a pair of posts that basically boiled down to “I bought a bunch of Ubiquiti network gear for questionably-justifiable reasons and had a few headaches making it all work”, I thought about putting in a sentence about how while it looked like THIS at the time:

I was going to have it all installed in the rack within the next month and it would look much better.

Apparently, I thought better about the optimism on display in that statement and edited that out, and it’s a good thing I did as it actually took me about 5 weeks to get to it.

But I did, this morning, after getting up at 5 AM because that’s when my alarm goes off during my work week and my body has no concept of “sleeping in on weekends” any more.

After breakfast and a little bit of dancing around the topic of getting down to business, it really didn’t take too long.  I had everything in the rack and connected by 7:15, at which point I proudly proclaimed to my wife that “I do more networking before eight AM than most people do all day!”, which was not met with nearly as much mockery as it deserved.

I did forgot to connect one thing, which was an ethernet cable to the big black server to the right of the rack in the top picture, but that was still accomplished before 8 and everything has been powered up and seems – SEEMS – to be working.

Once you have the door open, it does show that it could use a teeny bit of cable management.  A teeny bit. But the bits on the wires don’t know that the wires carrying them aren’t in the perfectly-managed order you see in some home labs, and what they don’t know won’t hurt me.

I am absolutely NOT going to show you a picture from behind.

I would love it if I had a cool rack-mounted NAS to fill up those empty two rack bays,  but my Synology NAS is a desktop style and Synology charges what I consider to be an insane amount to buy “the same thing you already own, just in a rack case”. Rather than spending that, I’m taking advantage of the fact that most rack components are not very deep, and the NAS is just tucked behind the Ubiquiti PDU on top of a shelf.  Technically it is mounted in a rack.

If drive prices ever come back down, maybe I’ll put in a UNAS.