Ubiquiti Home Network Part: I

This post will be part of a series documenting the network setup of my new apartment. The apartment is over 20 years old hence a major overhaul is required and the renovation is a great opportunity to lay CAT6A in the house for the 1Gbps/10Gbps network šŸ¤“.

My research began with this article on patnotebook.com detailing the conversion of telephone points to RJ45 data points in newer BTO (Build to Order) flats in Singapore. Newer flats in Singapore have CAT6 cables already nicely laid in the house, however many of the points are terminated with a telephone jack instead of RJ45. Based on the article, it seems that BTO flats only have one point terminated as RJ45, which is definitely not enough šŸ˜.

Older resale flats like mine do not come with any data points hence I will have to lay my own cables and design my own network infrastructure from scratch. On top of patnotebook.com, Iā€™ve relied on many youtube videos and blogs to learn basic networking concepts and the different components required to run a network.

Iā€™ve devoured Evan McCannā€™s tech blog since I plan to purchase Ubiquti hardware for the network. There are many nice articles that explain networking jargon in simple terms and breaks down the Ubiquiti universe in sizeable chunks. He is extremely detailed in doing breakdowns and making comparisons on the many Ubiquiti products as well. I would recommend his site as essential reading for whoever is considering putting together a Ubiquiti system!

I plan to update my progress with subsequent posts, but for now Iā€™ve made a simple diagram detailing the essential hardware required for the network setup.

The electrical layout

House electrical layout

The hardware diagram and breakdown

Network diagram

  1. Belden CAT6A 10GXE02
  2. 6U wall-mount Server Rack
  3. 24-Port Keystone Patch Panel
  4. Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X (ER-X)
  5. Unifi Switch 16 150W Gen 1
  6. Unifi Cloud Key Gen2 Plus (UCK-G2-PLUS)
  7. Unifi NanoHD (UAP-nanoHD)

Hello World!

The website is finally up and here is my first post!

Iā€™ve been meaning to create a work site for awhile now and Iā€™ve finally taken up the challenge after attending GAā€™s Intro to Coding: HTML & CSS Workshop. It was a short webinar that covered the fundamentals, which taught me enough to take the plunge.

So here it is!

I initially considered Wordpress for its wide usage but ultimately chose a static site generator like Jekyll for its quick deployment and little complexity. Static sites can be hosted directly on GitHub through GitHub pages. That means no hosting fees (!!!) and easy management of edits, thanks to versioning (which Iā€™m still discovering).

Things Iā€™ve learned and done so far

  • How to purchase a domain (namecheap) and point it to the host (GitHub)
  • Discovered GitHub Desktop
  • Better understand GitHub as a platform and its functions
  • Set-up and create a simple Jekyll site and host it on GitHub
  • How to host the site locally for testing
  • How to maintain the entire project on Atom

There were some issues along the way, so I wouldnā€™t say it was an easy ride. Fortunately, nothing is too difficult for Google & Stack Overflow. Iā€™ve learned plenty so far but there is still much to do and learn. Iā€™ll update this page as I go along.

Note:

Command to run Jekyll site locally

bundle exec jekyll serve

Passing the ā€“livereload option to serve will automatically refresh the page with each change to the source file.

bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload