My wife agreed to let me have a 12U rack, after searching marketplace for weeks and almost pulling the trigger on a brand new unit, a 18U turned up with some gear already fitted popped up and I snatched it up at a great price.
I’ve lurked this page for a long time and I am now jumping in. I already had the HP procurve switch and currently the fibre leading from the Cisco does nothing but it was in the rack so I patched it in.
Waiting to get different coloured patch leads for my CCTV to the Poe switch and my WAN connection. Also waiting on a shelf for my NVR and my Eero router aswell a PDU to get everything hooked up.
Happy to be critiqued on my work as it will only help me improve. I come from a CCTV background but only small residential so this size stuff is new too me. Ran data months ago but have been using all devices on wifi but now can get everything setup hardwired.
I prefer to dress my cables to the nearest chassis-wall. So if the blade is on the left, the patch cables are dressed to the left. This is done to make swapping the blades easier: the cables for one blade don’t interfere with the other. I would follow the same policy with the fiber cable, but that would be in a separate bundle from the copper patches. You already mentioned you’re getting new leads, get some different colors so you can easily determine subnet, or uplink without logging into the gear. Also, consider dressing the slack (if any remains after you get the new leads) under the switch, and a shelf for the 8-port “whatever”.
Looks great otherwise, have fun!
Great tips thank you. The fibre literally does nothing right now it’s more to keep the ends clean at the moment but I’ll be finding a use case for it soon.