I mentioned in my previous post that I had acquired a Unifi 10Gbit 8 port Aggregation switch, I also acquired a 12U Star Tech wall mountable rack for £100.00 from the same guy I bought the new NAS case from (picture is the 9U version).
This meant that I could move some of my kit from the loft and relocate it in this new rack which I have decided to keep in my ‘office’.
I moved the Kubernetes cluster as this was taking up the most space and was sliding off its shelf, despite the velcro I had used to hold the servers in place and added a Unifi US-24 switch to compliment the US-16-150W switch I already had in the office along with the new USW-Aggr and both of the PDU strips.
I initially purchased a 10Gbit RJ45 SFP+ adapter, for £56.00 from Amazon, to connect my iMac Pro to the USW-Aggr, however whilst it provided 10Gbit/s connectivity for a while, it soon overheated, to the point where it would have burned my fingers and dropped to less than 1Mbit/s throughput and I believe it also damaged the port in the switch as now although I can get other SFP+ modules to negotiate at 10Gbit/s in that port, they fail to generate any bandwidth over about 10Mbit/s!
As a result I returned the RJ45 SFP+ module and instead purchased a Planet XT-705A 10G/5G/2.5G/1G
I would have moved my Dell R210 ii server as well, however it is too deep and will not fit the rack, likewise I was thinking about a second Unifi US-48-500W, however that is also too deep to fit the rack.
I have the switches connected to each other via Unifi 0.5m SFP+ DAC cables, these don’t seem to play well if they are connected in 1Gbit/s SFP ports on both ends, however if you manually force a 10Gbit/s SFP+ port to 1Gbit/s and then connect the other end to a 1Gbit/s SFP port, they behave themselves.
The office rack is laid out as in the diagram above and in reality looks like the picture below:
I have since found someone on Facebook Marketplace selling a load of MoCA 2.5Gbit/s SFP+ (Magic SFP) modules as well as a number of USW-Aggr switches at a good price, so I may look to purchase a few modules and a second USW-Aggr switch so I can have a 5Gbit/a aggregated connection from my loft to my office over my existing pair of coax cables using MoCA.
This is what the network diagram will look like once I integrate the MoCA SFP+ and additional aggregation switch:
