Full Lab Tour 2026: Firewalls, Switches, NAS, and More

Now, we're not going to start the tour at the front of the racks. We'll get there. We got to go between the racks first because I actually use both sides of the racks. And this wall I'm standing against is actually the other side of the wall from my studio where my computer is. So, behind the racks is technically where it all begins cuz that's where the cable modem comes in and where my two UDMBBast firewalls are. Now, the two UDM beasts are set up in an HA pair. So, the bottom one is ready to take over if there's ever a problem. I've tested the takeover. I've done videos talking about how the failover works in the HA setup and it works the same in UDMB beast as it does in the older models as well quite well feeding that I have an older but still very viable USG XG16. This has got plenty of SFP and then four 10 gig ports. So this is the little connector that keeps them in sync and then each of these are feeding into this and you can see only one of them is on. It turns the other one off. Same thing with the two cables coming down just to my cable modem. The standard cable modem I'm fine with using from the supplier. I maybe one day will switch to the UniFi one. It's one of those ain't broke, don't fix it. So, simply using that. And then uh colorcoded power cords. I think these are important. So, you can put things like important power on the list here. Uh this feeds the beast going up above. You can see back there I got some blue cables. We'll talk about more of that when we get to the front. kind of swinging around back here though. This is storage for a little bit of extra wires. Uh these are some extra long HDMI cables at the top over here. Then kind of coming down, this is where my MacBook studio sits. Once again, behind the studio cuz this wall is the wall for the studio and this is sound deadening. So nothing comes in here. This is uh got drywall and board behind it. But kind of get you an idea of what it looks like. Now looking over here, this is the studio computer. It is also on this side of the wall. So, if you kind of look up, the camera's fading a little in the dark over here, but you can see the wires as they go through the wall. I put a wall plate on there. This is how the studio computer feeds the other side. And this is what ingest and records everything with all the cameras. I have a studio tour coming up soon, but for those wondering what the hardware looks like, it's just an older computer that runs OBS and pulls in via capture cards all the different feeds. Now, bringing it back around to the front, I'll pause at this. This is a device that I haven't fully reviewed. I've mentioned on a handful of live streams. This runs Proxbox right now. And pretty much most of the software that runs my lab or my home lab or however you want to describe it. This is what I'm using. And I'm going to do a dedicated video not about this as a product because yes, it was sent to me, but more about what CPU is on it and the fact that it doesn't take that much power to run your home lab. I know hardware is crazy expensive here in September of 2026. So, I moved everything to this lower powered hardware compared to many of the other things that I have in my rack here to show that it's very viable to functionally use a lower-end system. And these are just still dedicated to lab. Let's focus on rack one. This is how I turn everything on and off. Dead simple. Just one of these simple power switches that I can turn on different devices that are in there. Currently, the 6100 is on. Nothing's plugged into here. I have UniFi EFGs. I have these that I'm doing some testing on. This is for some upcoming videos talking about, well, this one's off right now, but talking about how to get started with UniFi. It really doesn't matter if you're using a high-end UniFi or a low-end UniFi. It's just a matter of setting them up and going through all the settings and showing you how they work. So, these are frequently reset or sometimes I test updated firmware cuz, you know, want to make sure I'm on the latest and finding any bugs with it and reporting them back to UniFi. The cables are somewhat organized here. And this may look strange how it feeds into the switch. That'll be later in the video. I'll just talk about all the VLAN splitting I do. And that's related to all of this. And that's because I just have a series of VLANs. And that's how I feed back out of the LAN on any of these firewalls, including the Netgate ones down here. And it feeds back into the network. Now, currently, I don't have a feedback for the LAN on this side. I just don't really need it right now. I have a pair of these. and I just move one down if I need to do some type of inter VLAN checking. That'll be later in the video kind of going over some of that setup. I have an older Cisco here. I've done some testing with some Alta Labs and it's usually off cuz not overly impressed. Uh leave comments if you want to hear my thoughts on some of the Alta Labs stuff down below or hit me up in the forums on that. But back over here, the one through eight and then these two over here, they all correspond to the cables I have over here. So cable six, cable five relates to any of those cables. This is what makes it easy for me when I'm setting something up for lab to be able to just plug something in or even plug a Raspberry Pi in with the AP PoE and power it up and test the device and stick it on whatever network I want. And maybe if I wanted number six here behind the network on this netgate, I would tag this VLAN to the same VLAN that's on number six here and it would be able to POE power it and I could put a device behind there, etc. It makes for some really easy network testing. Uh, I love rack studs. That's what's holding all of these in. This had a better holder. It broke. Uh, this one's not broke, but you just spin these in. If you haven't seen them, rack studs are great. I've been using them for things. little jet KVM and a little printed holder for it. It's uh not hooked up at the moment, but really handy when you have devices that maybe you want to hook up that are in your lab that well don't have a lights out management system. Speaking of labs, this what this is here and this is sometimes if you've seen it on my network logging into things called the ugly NAS and this is just an older free NAS, but it's actually running the latest true NAS but it's a really old system and I'm testing for an upcoming video these UniFi bridge switches. So I have it powering another switch here and I'm connected it. So, it's actually doing a series of backups cuz I'm load testing this switch because it does wireless bridging to put some real traffic over it over time to see if there's any issues. These are some of the lab scenarios I test. And then coming down a little further, I have the UPS Pro I've been testing. These are just really nice UPS's I bought a long while back, and I have one on each side of my network uh as a feed. Now, I'm not feeding this off of that. That's a not great idea to do. Each one's independent, but I wanted to test these. So, there's a review coming in the future on this. These have been very trouble-free UPS's. I really like them. I'll leave the specs down below for you those interested. They've held up over the years, but warning, they are expensive. Now, I have cable modem for internet, and it's actually quite reliable, but you still need a backup cuz, well, things go down. And I have the UniFi 5G here. I've got it hooked up with Google Fi. I've done a review of this already. I was going to put this outside. I have an outdoor one too that I've tested, but it's got all the bars and works great here in my basement. So, uh, one of those ain't broke, don't fix it. So, it's went from a temporary to a essentially permanently seems to live here. I also have a few extra cables once again for plugging and hooking things up. Uh, for convenience, little blower here, label maker. I've talked about the Nimbot label maker. This is a slightly newer model, but it works great. I like sticking labels on everything. And then some of you may wonder why I did this. And it comes down to convenience. So you can side mount a switch. And this is essentially where most of the wires come in throughout the house for things like cameras and networking. And once again, I'm big on labeling everything cuz I think everything should have a label on it. So I know where any of these wires came in. Put them across here. This is just much more accessible than having something in a rack like this cuz they all come in here. every time I wanted to change something, it'd be a little less convenient. So, having this here is well, I think quite convenient and doesn't bother me. Some people think everything should be only in the rack, etc. And that's fine. Uh, like I said, there's always opinions on how these things are set up, but I do try to follow a relatively reasonable color coding and setup of these. Occasionally, there's a extra odd wire because I'm testing another camera that's mounted to the ceiling. It's been there longer than I'd expect, but Eventually, I'll route it properly, and because it's a camera, it'll get the proper cable colors on it. Now, at the very top here is Home Assistant. I've done a whole video on Home Assistant. I have it currently running from the rack here. It's just one red cable, but uh eventually I'd want to put a UPS on it, which I mean like a battery dedicated to it. It's obviously tied to the UPS because this is powered from the UPS, but if I wanted a home assistant to kind of be more independent, I thought about putting another level of redundancy on it. So when it shuts down, if it loses network, it's not just going to drop because of the PoE. That would be the challenge it has right now. If the PoE drops, uh, it will just shut off. But maybe that'll get fixed later. I keep saying it, but it's been up there for several years and running along fine on a Raspberry Pi. Maybe I'll virtualize it in the future. Different discussion. Now, coming over here, we'll start with something that's turned off that I don't know what to do with at the moment. It's a DVA 1622 Synology. This used to be the cameras that I was using when I had Synology cameras. And I've mentioned this a few times since I moved over to the UniFi camera system. And Synology feels like they're at the same place they were when I started using them six or seven years ago. And it's not a bad system. It's just something I ended up really pulling out and not using anymore for just not having all the features I want. So, for now, that's off. I turn it on once in a while to update it to see if things have changed, but they haven't last time I checked. Ryzen 1, Ryzen 2, Ryzen 3. I'll throw the specs somewhere on the screen for these for those wondering. These are three lab servers currently to run XCPNG and one runs Proxmox, but that's dynamic and can be changed. Back to the little Harbor Innovations is the one I leave just running Proxmox right now. I go back and forth between these softwares because of different testing I'm going to do or understanding of things. Uh, so these ones can be reloaded. There's nothing particularly important. They're just labs. I still back my labs up and can convert them between the different hypervisors on a as needed basis. Most of that storage is happening here on the 45 drives HL15. This is my higher performance storage. It's got a series of spinning discs on one side and SSDs on the other. It's a great system. I did a little short recently talking about putting a new filter in this. I've also upgraded the fans. This thing is quiet. By the way, there's not a bunch of noise cancelling going on. This is the upgraded fans in that have uh provided a relatively quiet system. Hard to do that one-handed. It'll slide it out a little bit. If you can see hiding in there, they're just Noctua fans for those wondering. It's part of a kit that 45 Drives has to uh get this little quiet. And feel free to flame me in the comments. I I know I should put these somewhere, not just sitting like this, but it's convenient to do. And if you haven't seen the 45 HL15 air filter, it's actually really slick. That's why I wanted to pull this out. Uh, keeps the dust out. I don't have much dust in here, so the house is fairly new, but makes it pretty convenient. And then, uh, we'll try and slide this back on with one hand. Maybe have some success. We'll fix that. We'll fix that later. All right. This might be old. Still edits all my videos. This video is being edited on this little Trunass Mini R with 64 gigs of memory, which actually, I guess, is expensive now. It wasn't expensive back when I got this a number of years ago. Uh, this system's been just humming away. We have the UNAS Pro. I have actually a few Unass, but not all of them are here. I have a whole another location where uh I store some of the things and put them in production use. But this is the one here. I keep tabs on the Unash Pro. I do use this for sharing out videos with other people. I'm going to do some updated reviews. Once again, it my reviews I try to really base on heavier usage and my usage has been pretty solid on this and no complaints. And then the reviews are coming for the larger ENAS systems. We've been putting them through some productionheavy use. We actually got two of them now and uh they're really impressive. So, I'm really happy with the Unash Pros. Uh these other ones running True Ness, though. True NAS has been my go-to for a long time, but I'm really impressed, especially with the file sharing options you get with the Unash Pro series. And I still have this Synology. This Synology runs my backups. It runs backups for any Windows PC, which is down to really just one and maybe some virtual machines. I like the Synology backup software for that. And it's not just for that. The bigger task that this is doing is backing up everything I have in my Google account. So Synology has backups for that works really, really well and been using it for years. So being able to back up Google accounts without any extra licenses. Synology is still a solid option for that compared to the much more expensive cloud backup options because you can't just trust Google to have your backups. That's unfortunate, but uh that's not something I trust. If they have a accident or goof up the account, I want to make sure that I have backups of all my data. This is off at the moment. I just have it unplugged, but I plug it back in and set it up from time to time when I'm testing new cameras. This is the previous NVR Pro before I move to the newer NVR that they offer. And then down here at the bottom, we have the 45 Drives Home Lab. This is the HL8. I think this is a great little box. It's my media server. Okay, maybe there's a little bit of dust in this one. Not bad. It's been a while since I opened it. So, I could probably take and clean that out pretty soon. There's a little bit of little bit of dust on there. Little bit of dust from the uh stickers. I think I probably had on these at one point. I've done videos and talks about 45 hardware. It's just really nice. I can't really open this up all the way cuz it this part flips up. If you haven't seen how that works, it's rather clever. But the 45 drives is just been a solid performer. Both this home lab and of course than the uh HL15 unit. I still have more 45 drives. Many of them that we bought that are at clients. And then we have another one that I keep more off-site backups with, which is why it's not in these racks here. Wouldn't be offsite. Coming over here to the back of this rack, we have the USW Pro aggregation switch. And we have a another UniFi switch. So this feeds many of the IPMIs. Most everything else is DAC and a series of DAC cables that I try to keep reasonable. I'll pull the side off here in a moment to show, but these are the Ryzen 1, 2, and three systems. Once again, they're all connected with these DAC cables. This is for the IPMI lights out management. So, that's why we have one standard switch up here. And the cabling's reasonable as you can be for the back of the rack. And a lot of the stuff not really enterprisegrade with dual power supplies. So, it just has the one power cord and we have these in the rack here to make the power cords fit really nice. And uh yeah, it just all fits good. I I can't remember where we got this. I know it didn't come with the rack. It's kind of just a simple power plug system that bolted right in. I I really can't remember where we got it. I don't recall it coming with the rack, but uh turned out to work really well cuz we have these powers and of course same UPS all the way down here at the bottom. Now, even the 45 drives system is connected with DAC down here. So, these are able to hold one card. And I've talked about using DAC. It's just a lot more convenient to hook up as much as possible with DAC. The exception being the Synology. I do have it dual connected uh for some of the two networks that it was on at the time. It doesn't really need it now, but uh it doesn't have a DACK because it has a spot for a deck that has never got around to putting in. But even this right here was a half height. This older True NAS Mini and it's running wood deck. For those who want to see the rack from the side, we'll go ahead and pop this off. It actually makes the stickers easier to display as well. These cables are too long and I should replace them with shorter ones instead of putting them in a loop here. They were a bunch of older DAC cables that I had, but there was nothing wrong with them and I couldn't see replacing them. So, I kind of have a service loop cuz I could measure and buy the exact length, but you know, I didn't. So, that'll be one of those I'll fix it later, but it's later and it'll probably never get fixed. Then, we have here the Velcro usage. I try to do this everywhere, even the power cords. Velcro usage all the way around. You'll notice that kind of throughout the rack. Anywhere I have is as much Velcro as possible. And I'll point out the ceiling for those wondering. Yes, I do have little magnets that just hold everything to the ceiling. So, all of the cables that connect each of these switches to each other and go between the racks once again are all going there in the cleanest way possible, keeping them up over to make it functional. But yeah, I know it's not absolutely the prettiest, but this is a lab and it's really designed for function. Now, let's talk stickers. There's a lot of stickers on here because, well, you can only fit so many on your laptops. And I decided, hey, why not put these stickers on my rack? And it's been just slowly growing as I've got these cuz, you know, I didn't really like it just looking all plain. There are, of course, stories for me going to Wild West Hackingfest or uh my friends at Wayne State sending me stickers. Come in. We're open source. No idea where it came from. Probably someone sent it to me. If you send me stickers, my address is on my website. I end up sharing these. Uh I have no problem putting cool stickers. Not every sticker you send me will make it, but at least ones I think look cool, like where this one says hacker. Wire shark. Um, hack the planet after coffee. I I just have so many of them. Some Huntress stickers. I had these before I'd uh worked at Huntress cuz I was always a longtime Huntress user. More Girkcon Girkon Girkcon stickers. A Frack sticker that seems to be peeling off a little bit here. Uh, I thought this is funny. This is the old UniFi Protect stickers. So, I put it there. And not all of these. I I don't know why. I think one of my employees back at the time had come over here after I built this or gave it to me. Uh so yes, we have a high seafruit punch on there. So they may not all have purpose, but some of them, you know, are kind of cool. I don't remember where I got the loft heavy industry ones, but look up the history for loft. It's really cool. There's a whole book and you find a link to the book on my website talking about the some of the hacking history in Loft. It's it's pretty cool. And for those that have been following my channel for a long time may have recognized this. This was the former face plate to my old rack I had years and years ago at my old office. And uh I've kept the face plate. The rack was trash, but the face plate's cool. And I had a lot of stickers on it. And these are my favorite stickers. And I have some lights on it. So this is kind of the what is behind me from the studio. Uh this one, Planet Recycling, is something my friend had started a recycling company. That was actually one of the first stickers on here from like 10, maybe even 15 years ago. Uh, and PC Pickup is a company when I was doing PC retail repair. That was, uh, where this came from. These are like the first couple stickers to ever make it on to this. And just over the years, it's grown to different ones. And, uh, that's why these are here. And this particular one's always been a favorite. I try to keep everything in my lab relatively organized and broken down into some level of categories like power cords or PoE injectors or a handful of MVME and SSDs. Uh, I had a handful that have been pulled out. They're all older ones. They're not particularly great. They're just consumer drives, but when you want to do a demo or set something up, these are handy things to have. I have some box of random when I don't know where to put things, but somewhat organized here. And same thing with rack ears, keystones, all those extra rack nuts are in here. Uh, extra deck cables, patch cables, etc. And this is the other area that is kind of still my lab because it does have some connections that go over to the other side. There's just one switch there. Two ports hooked up to that 10 gig XG16 switch. Uh this is where I work on things and other projects that might need to be filmed. Might put the camera top down. I've got some mounts up above and plenty of lighting. Uh keeps it nice and bright on here. And if you flip all the way around, we're back into the studio where I sit. So, from this view here, this is the kind of more like the view that you're used to seeing is kind of from this angle, but if you kept it going around, you'd be back over to this side here. And I am working on a full tour of everything in my studio space and covering how it's all set up. That'll be coming at a later date. I mentioned when I was talking about the switches, all the different VLANs I have. I'm not going to get too in-d depth on this cuz I already have an older lab video. I'm going to do a newer one because, well, the UniFi interface has changed quite a bit for setting up VLANs. They've made it, I think, a lot easier, but that of course means it's different than it was before. But for what networks I have, I have the CGNet one. This one seems to cause controversy in the comments occasionally. Yes, you can run internal CGET. I do this just because I like seeing the 16869 IP range on a firewalls WAN instead of a RFC1918 address. Uh, my favorite YouTube comment though is the person who told me it is illegal for me to do that internally. Uh anyways, then I have home things which is pretty self-explanatory. I think it's where all the things that uh my wife puts on the network and anything she buys. This is the IoT network of things I would prefer not to have, but at least I'll quarantine them off separately. Uh then I have labs 101 through 105. These are the ones because it says third party gateway I assign to the LAN side of any firewall I'm testing. So I can take and group things into lab 101 to create a virtual lab environment where I might be testing a bunch of other network devices I want behind a different firewall that's not mine. So that firewall will have a WAN and the CGET a LAN that is thirdparty gateway and I'll get more in depth on how that works in a future video. Then I have a few others like my out ofband management things essentially where lights out or management control planes go with a particular lockdown rules. Shared lab is uh that's a different story. It's not set up right now, but it was for sharing a lab with a friend. Don't route your storage. So storage is this VLAN 20. It says third party gateway. And UniFi Protect gets its own network as well. That is where the NVR lives along with all the cameras. Now, here's a full list of all the devices. I have the E7 and the U7 outdoor and the U7 Pro wall that gives me full coverage at my house inside and out. I'm going to do a separate Wi-Fi video because I've been using this outdoor one for a while and the range on it is really impressive. And for indoor, one indoor one in my basement's enough to cover well the square footage I have for my house. And that's going to be a separate video I do just talking about some of the Wi-Fi and the setup. But this is also a full list of all the different hardware that I have connected for those wondering. I like that they now have this little topology view or even better an infrastructure view. So you can see the LTS studio, which is interesting to me that it only shows one, but I guess this is just the primary one all the time. I might look a little funny if they stack two together, but it is in an HA setup. Then it goes to that USGXG16. One wire heads over to the 24 port rack, and I have them labeled in terms of where they're located. So some are in rack one, some are in rack two. And you can see how it all tears down as it goes through. And speaking of rack one or rack two, I think this is a nice feature they added, which is device tags. So I can filter for things are in rack one or things that are in rack two pretty quickly here. It's a nice little quality of life feature, but does become quite handy if you have large networks with lots of devices and you want to sort them by tags. Well, thanks for hanging around to the end of this lab tour. Tell me if you loved it or if you hated it. If you loved it, give it a thumbs up. If you hated it, give it two thumbs up. Hit that button twice is what I'm trying to say. Uh like and subscribe and all those fun things. Please hit me up on the socials at laurrensystems.com or go to my forums at forums.lorsystems.com to have a more in-depth discussion about this or any other topics or let me know what I left out or what I missed or what you would like to know more about. All right, and thanks. Back to editing. [music]