Earlier this year I moved into a new place which fortunately is very lovely, but not so fortunately only has a wired Internet connection on the ground floor, with the other two stories being dependent on wifi.
“Bad signal will never be a thing ‘round these parts”
Since I’m planning on staying in my new home for at least a couple years, I decided to spend some money on installing a proper wired network and a 10" network rack, so bad signal will never be a thing ‘round these parts.
In the center of my house, there’s a small pantry that contains the fuse box and a few shelves. It provides just enough space to store some buckets and a vacuum cleaner.
Since it’s so central to the house, and very much out-of-sight, it would be the ideal location to tie the entire network together. But because it’s so tiny, I’m not willing to sacrifice any significant storage space.
I figured that if I could hang a small 10" patch panel from the bottom shelf, instead of a regular-sized — and may I say ginormous — 19“ panel, that would be perfect!
“The only rack that came close to what I was looking for was 19 inches in size”
Armed with these parameters I boldy went on my quest for eternal wiredness, but things weren’t as simple as I hoped. Because even though many 10" rack mountable appliances exist, the choice for actual 10" racks is surprisingly lacking — I spent a couple hours looking for a suitable rack, but the only rack that came close to what I was looking for was 19 inches in size. Pity.
I’ve contemplated several times just throwing the towel and going with a 19" rack instead, even though that would be ridiculous for the space I wanted to mount it in. And I’ve considered buying this desktop mount, even though that didn’t fit my purposes entirely and was pretty expensive. Then I got a bright idea: what if I could shrink the otherwise perfect 19 inch rack to 10 inches?
So I bought the 3U 19" rack, grabbed my trusty metal saw and removed about 13 inches from the middle of the top bar, and presto: I now got a rack that scales from 6 to infinite inches. Beautiful!
I slapped a 12 keystone modules patch panel in there, a power strip with four sockets and a rack shelf to hold my router and switch. Then I got some drawer guides from the DIY store which I attached to both sides of the rack.
Eventually I took the entire thing and screwed that under of the bottom shelf in my pantry, and there we have it: a small and simple rack that fits almost anywhere, with easy access for cable management. Cost without keystones is 70-ish euros, which I think makes it pretty affordable as well!
A word on cabling
Now, the story could have ended here, but I’d like to give other aspiring amateur network aficionados like myself some tips I learned during this endeavour. Tips that would have saved me a couple hours and euros. The most important point being: understand the cable types you’re installing — knowing the CAT-type you need is not enough, because “All CAT6a cables are equal, but some CAT6a are more equal than others”. I hope I reproduced that quote correctly.
“All CAT6a cables are equal, but some CAT6a are more equal than others” — actual quote from the famous e-book “LAN-farm” by Gorgious Connectwell
I learned this the hard way when I installed stranded cables in my wall instead of solid ones, which keystones and most other wallmounted terminators don’t attach to particularly well, because they’re built with solid cables in mind. Multiple forums and blogs tell me I’m not the only one making that mistake and then having to replace all their cables, so I figured I would give you a headsup so you can avoid making the same mistake.
As for U/UTP vs S/FTP et al: you’re probably fine with U/UTP for your home, unless you’re running 10s of cables bundled together. That’s the consensus I find anyway, e.g. this post on Reddit. Speaking from my own experience, I installed three U/UTP cables that run through my crawling space, through walls and a floor, in some places parallel to a couple of PVC-enclosed electrical wires, and everything seems to work just fine when I test for speed and packet loss.
And finally, you do not ever want to use subpar, non-standardized, quickly degrading and fire hazard prone Copper Clad Aluminum (CCA) cables. Always use 100% copper (CU) cabling instead. In all honesty I don’t speak from personal experience here, but took the many, many warnings I read to heart — I might have fallen victim to a clever ruse by Big Copper though, so don’t take my word for it. Maybe someone with some actual expertise can add some nuance to these criticisms in the comments?
In conclusion
When you have little space available, and your budget is tight, you might find that a network rack is just not in the cards for your home. But with a little creativity, determination and a metal saw you might turn your luck around :)
Also, make sure you know the difference in cable types, and install the proper ones: it might save you a lot of time, money and even house fires if I’m to believe the warnings by Internet strangers.
