 So our studio rack is finished. I did a video the other day about how this ties into our virtual lab Which I can link below but I've done review on this particular rack before but not built as this So this is a star tech open post rack adjustable. I'll link also to the video where I do a specific review of this rack We like it. It's great for if you're building a home lab offer some of the small offices We put them in it's handy. It's on wheels. It rolls around. It's you know quite sturdy Now the next thing we did in this that's a little bit different This wasn't in the review But you can go over to Lowe's Home Depot or whatever hardware store you want that can cut the wood for you You don't have the tools to do so and we threw a board and just painted it black on top And I got some flush mount screws here This adds some stability to it because I want to admit this is not something it comes with But it has a little stability and an easy place to set your monitor in this case We stuck the Synology up here So it's the only real Non-stock add-on we have for the rack other than that it's just you know standard rack build This has got adjustable depth on it and I go in and talk about that in that video now next thing down We've did a ADJ PC 100 a rack mount, you know 19 inch wide power switch now These are handy because you know want to be able to turn individual things on and off I like the way everything lights up on it. Actually, I think I have that probably turned out at least one of my lights Yep, I have one of the lights hooked up to it. So they're nice They have all of the light up so you know if they're on you see if you're getting power to it It's kind of standard, you know Just plugs on the back and makes it real simple and keeps all your wiring behind here and keeping this clean Look as I think clean wiring is really important Even if it's a home lab that you plan on changing a lot or our studio lab here But we plan on you know changing configurations now next down is this this patch panel And I have one that's out so you can get a better idea And this is a modular patch panel as opposed to your standard Where you punch down all the wires now the reason we went modular and these can be really handy for Doing this is when you have a modular patch panel you can just pop these in and out and change it around whoever you want and they just come right out and you can Put in a different module a blank fill them in however you want and a couple of the things that I have in this modular patch panel The demo one is one standard keystone like for standard when you punch down the wires and then to keep it clean You can tighten it up right here so the wires are nice and straight then I have a couple of these ones Which are just double-sided so you can use a Patch cable on this side and on the other side you could just use another pre-fabbed patch cable And the reason for some of those is some of these we did that way because like the way they have the cloud key sitting here I had a patch cable and I wanted the patch cable to go around in the back Because it doesn't look good if it comes around here at the front or if we just you know ran it up and over this way So putting those double-sided keystones on there means I can still keep the wiring nice and neat and clean And as you can see I got some color-coding I did here. I just bought a variety of colors It's not really color-coded, but we have done a lot of installs where we Specifically will color them for the client that makes it a lot easier to choose You know which one is in there and you can tell people plug the red wire into the red and a blue into the blue and I didn't get a Lot of different color patch cables. We had one red. We had a bunch of black and stocks I used them, but I'll leave links where you can get these little short patch cables They come in different colors and you can you know water the ones and we've done this from like I said many clients Where we match certain things maybe you want all the POE ones to be a certain color And different networks to be different colors. It's handy to do that Now the other advantage of using a modular one is these keystones for things like HDMI you can get keystones for a lot of different things and We have a couple HDMI's because we're using them actually for part of the studio And we were going to put some of the other studio video equipment in here And we still might but it kind of makes all the cables a little bit messier Because they have to go somewhere and back around because I usually like to have this whole rack behind us when we're recording But we have them in another module or a rack where we actually plug in each of the cameras So you can get like I said a variety of things your standard keystones and it makes it easy to take these in and out Now the rest of the slots over here. We just filled with blanks Just a static to keep the aesthetic so everything's nice and clean and instead of having some holes in there now next down We're just running a unified 24-port switch POE this makes it easy for us to power things off of here So if I'm doing some of the demos and that's what a lot of this build was for So make it even easier to do some of the videos But when we're doing a demo I can quickly plug something in a power it matter of fact This is powered off of the POE here, you know different cameras different things We're working on be able to make it pretty simple and then below here is a PF sense Currently it's just a 1u rack mounted and I'll probably do a review specifically of this later But we had actually had a fan send us this which is thank you very much And it's handy because we are planning on loading some different firewall software So I wanted it right here, and then we use the series of VLANs as I showed in my other video To give it LAN 1 LAN 2 in a WAN IP address and then separate out the networks But it makes it easy so I have something physical to demo things on for stuff I want to run you know on real hardware not always virtualized But it's a 1u super micro server up maybe a separate review on that now I see something go on shelves so we have this this is just a shelf and I have one I don't want to take that one back out That's just one of these shelves now leave a link where you can get all the parts I'm talking about here including this you know We get all this from Amazon for pretty reasonable price, so this shelf is got two bolts on it It's pretty sturdy in there And someone's probably gonna point out the fact that I didn't put all the bolts in and I didn't for some of These I don't have anything too heavy on there, and it wasn't a big deal to me And I still we think this is a configuration will keep it in And it's kind of just laziness that I didn't put these in with more bolts, but it's holding it's stable It's sturdy now next thing down is this server we have sitting here Now this server whoops knocked the light off this server is a For you, I think it's a rose will not Roswell case I'm not positive But the way you get these servers in here when you get a deal on a server and you didn't get the right rails for it Or they're a pain sometimes when you have custom cases or you get a deal When you're building your lab, you're like, oh the rails are gone or the rails don't line up to the Rack I have properly and that can always be a pain and that's where these come in These are some nape point and the way they sit in here. They're just nape point rails They're just the servers sliding across here. They're well painted well made Adjustable size or whatever length or whatever depth you have your rack set to these will fit in there Now I do really recommend when you do these you put a couple bolts here and a couple bolts here So you actually do both these and you can kind of see down at the bottom this does have all the screws in it and what this allows you to do is I Keep it from twisting because the one downside if you get ones that aren't solid all the way across is they twist in like that So when they cock out a little bit when you try a slide server and it might hit this little rail So you want to stay nice and tight so that doesn't happen They do make and I'll leave a link to them if you're interested They make ones that go all the way back But they're cost a lot more these are relatively inexpensive and get a few of these in there And it's still easy to slide the servers in and out And that's kind of something we're going to be doing is swapping this out because I have several other boxes sitting over here And I want to do some more hardware demos and I have a couple of servers that might be coming in here And I want to do reviews on and this is a quick way to slide them in and out of the rack for making videos So these work really great. So that's pretty much it Not real in-depth here. It's pretty basic But the goal is you know clean cabling easy to do easy to turn things on and off Obviously there's a risk because there's no cover over this one that if this is within reach as you know People will poke at things and don't let your kids get by it because they're really oh I can just turn things on and off right that could obviously be bad But from a lab standpoint for me be able just to plug some different things in and be able to Swap servers out real quick and have the power and access here. It's great So I think it's a relatively inexpensive lab build never gonna beat the deals You're gonna find on you know, I use parts on Craigslist But that comes with its own risk of dealing with people on Craigslist and hoping that they're not shady themselves and meeting in somewhere I like buying things on Amazon and it just arrives and I can just do some assembly with all this Thanks for watching if you liked this video Give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content hit that subscribe button and the bell icon And maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post if you want to hire us for a project that you seen or discussed in this video Head over to Lawrence systems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project You want to throw at us? Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further head over to forums at Lawrence systems.com where we can keep the conversation going And if you want to help the channel out in other ways We offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you in a small cut for us That does help fund this channel and once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time