This weekend I added the UPS, (APC2200) and did a little more cable management to really clean things up. Some thoughts and future work. I was thinking I was going to buy a much smaller, and less heavy, UPS. After going back and forthe I ended up getting a 2U APC 2200. I had NEMA 5-20 already for the equipment so going with a nice biug UPS was not a problem except that there was no way it was going to be supported in the rack in the 2U space that was open. So I used my vertical rack mount for servers and put it right there and it worked out perfectly.

However, now that I have that extra 2U in the rack I am kicking myself for not using 2U cable management as opposed to the 1U. So yes there will be a future where i replace those 1U cable management with 2U Cable Management and probably need longer patch cables than I have but that will be for another day!!! 

Now for the UPS when I first got it all running it was saying 1hour 10 minutes for run time and i was kicking myself for buying this big hulking UPS and wonder where I calculated things wrong. However after a calibration test I was down to 36 minutes runtime. I had targeted 30 minutes with a little overhead so pretty dead on!

Very long evening Friday and all day Saturday. I finished the patching and cable management, I did a little electrical work but still need to spend a bit more time on that. I also handled all media connections - 14 x RG6 connections and 5 zones of whole home audio, each including left and right speakers and 2 ethernet control drops. The SONOS devices are a lot more happy. I need to do some work to allow my SONOS visible on my main user VLAN as with all these changes I finally moved my Sonos to my iot VLAN - Going to try this technote from packetmischief.ca .
I found a nice rackmount for the Intel NUCs and upgraded my rackmount power supplies. I also moved my NAS to a much more convenient location. Phase 3 will consist of some additional electrical work (probably will not be visible) and I really need to get a much bigger UPS for this

I completely forgot to take a picture before, so this is shortly after I started. But ugly - The cabinet was packed, yet all the patches came in and out to it. So it was time to do it right now - I'm still kicking myself for not just using 19 racks with std patch panels—time to fix my mistake. With the family gone for the weekend, I began by re-terminating everything onto 19-inch patch panels. However, these were unique patch panels that used keystone jacks. Using keystones jacks was extraordinary in many different ways. First, I had room to work as I terminated the individual jacks. Second I would never have a problem where a port on the panel breaks, and now I have to work around it - My OCD brain does not like that. Lastly, it helped keep the network running as I could keep port downtime to less than 5 minutes. Uptime did not matter as everyone was gone, but I realized I could have done it with the entire family home with little interruption. 

After a full day of re-terminating all the cables and moving my core network equipment over the panel, I was finally done with Phase 1. 

While this still looks like a mess, it is better than I had before. But it's only phase 1. Phase 2, Planned for next weekend, will hopefully add some cable management and updated patch cables. Then, as time permits, I may tackle phase 3, including rack mounting and cleaning up all home audio and video capabilities!

I recently completed a research report on the "Effects of Technology on Libraries". Please check it out under my research section. As many of you know I am a huge advocate of libraries and all the things they do for our communities. 

My new book is finally all set to order from Amazon. We had a few hiccups with Amazon getting it all set on the site but it's finally all set. I am also starting work on my second book which I am hoping to have ready in the spring/summer of 2018.

Just received an advance copy of the new book - Publisher is still working out some issues with Amazon but hope to get a link up here soon. I'm very pleased with how it came out and very appreciative of my Co-Author Bob Perciaccante's work and all the work from ​Packt Publishing.

I am very excited that after several months of work my first book will be released in the coming weeks - Still waiting for some things to update shortly but will share more information as soon as I can.

Welcome to the new home of my blog - I just moved it over so it will take me a bit of time to get going but hopefully you will comeback and find some really useful information. Feel free to look around I plan on getting most of the static content up and running first!