Buying a network cabinet is the best and most pointless addition to my home lab

I’ve had an issue with the home network ever since upgrading it from an ISP-supplied router affair to dedicated hardware for switching, routing, and wireless clients. We’ve gone from a single device for handling everything going in and out of the home, as well as internal traffic, to a cluster of components that make up an advanced home networking solution. It’s becoming more common as we add hardware to existing LANs that ISP routers cannot keep up with due to lack of connectivity. The issue arises when you’ve got too much hardware and nowhere to install it and that’s what I recently solved with a networking cabinet — the best and most pointless addition to my home lab.

How a home lab can become messy

It doesn’t take long for a home lab or basic home office to get out of hand. A single wireless router handling everything in the home is great for keeping things simple. Simply adding a network switch to improve the number of ports available will add more cabling to the mix. This includes power for the switch itself, and networking between the router and switch, as well as all connected clients. RJ45 is always going to provide a better connection than wireless, which can then lead to instances where you have network cables running between rooms.

A home lab will typically be in a single room where it’s easier to test IT equipment, play around with various hardware, and try out new ways to break everything. As aforementioned, when adding components to the LAN, you’ll find yourself expanding this test environment to encompass more parts of the home. Perhaps you wish to add some IP cameras for home security and use POE+ to provide both power and data streams? That’s going to require cabling to be routed through the house to the various camera deployments. Not using a cabinet of sorts will result in all your expensive networking gear being unprotected, much like an open-air PC case.

It’s possible to carefully plan everything to the single server hub and attempt some cable management with switches and other devices in a stack, which is precisely what I did with a shelving unit. It’s not the cleanest finish, but at least keeps things looking somewhat organized.

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A cabinet can change the game

I ended up expanding to two EnGenius switches, a custom-built OPNsense firewall router, and two EnGenius access points. Adding a Ring alarm base station, Philips Hue hub, and SSD NAS only compounded the problem with a full stack of hardware. The cabling wasn’t terrible but it didn’t look quite right and would get coated in dust within a few weeks. This is what led me to finally pick up a network cabinet. I’ve held off from doing so for years, but it’s time to dedicate some floor space for all the equipment. I didn’t want a full-size server cabinet just yet, but it’s certainly on the cards.

Setting everything up was straightforward since all the necessary hardware comes with the switches and anything else that can be installed inside a cabinet. All I needed to do was plan where it was going to sit, cut the cabling accordingly, and start transferring everything across. The actual downtime between having the equipment piled up on a shelf and neatly installed within a cabinet was minimal at just north of an hour, but this is ample for everyone to start questioning my motives when Netflix cuts out as I fiddle around. And, looking back at the move, I didn’t need to pick up a cabinet and create something truly awesome.

By going with a compact data cabinet, this is also something I can upgrade from, instead of outright replacing, keeping most of the networking hardware inside and migrating the NAS and everything else to a full-size equivalent. This will also allow for future planning around wall-mounting in a cooler location without taking up too much space until then. It’s utterly pointless since everything worked just fine with the solution we had, but having everything inside the data cabinet makes sense and looks the part, especially with shorter cables and space for the UPS.