Coat closet → 42U rack. Firewalla + UniFi core, 10G aggregation, T420 “main brain” now live, local-only family AI cluster next

Rack: StarTech 42U 4-post open frame at 28" depth, on casters so I can roll it out for rear access.

Top to bottom:

**•** 2× vented blanks **•** Firewalla Gold on a keystone tray with the ARRIS S33 modem (2.5G handoff) **•** USW-Aggregation: the 10G SFP+ layer for the NAS, the T420, and anything 10G I add later **•** Cable Matters 24-port Cat6A patch panel **•** USW-Pro-Max-16-PoE, the core: 2.5G to the U7 Pro APs **•** USW-Pro-24-PoE, the leaf: cameras and bulk PoE drops, with a DAC uplink **•** Horizontal cable manager **•** Second 24-port Cat6A patch panel **•** Monitor on a VESA rack bracket, a locking drawer, and a sliding keyboard tray **•** Mac mini M4 in a 2U mount, plus 5× Apple TV 4K in rack mounts, one per room, sent out over J-Tech HDBaseT extenders **•** Hub shelf: APsystems solar ECU, Hue bridge, and others **• Dell PowerEdge T420**, racked sideways **•** Synology DS925+ and DS418 on a sliding shelf **•** Brush panel **•** UniFi USP-PDU-Pro **•** UniFi UPS 2U (1.44 kVA) 

Storage and backup (3-2-1-ish):

**•** DS925+ is the primary storage. **•** DS418 is the local backup in the same rack. **•** DS412+ is the offsite backup, over Tailscale. 

Network:

**•** Firewalla Gold handles all routing and firewall policy. UniFi handles switching and Wi-Fi only, with no UniFi gateway. **•** There are 9 VLANs: Admin, IoT, Kids, Guest, Cameras, NAS, Voice Assistants, Home Security, and AV. mDNS relay keeps HomeKit and AirPlay working across them. **•** 3× U7 Pro APs **•** About 10 Reolink PoE cams, currently being moved to Frigate 

T420 "main brain" (Proxmox):

**•** Second CPU (E5-2440 + E5-2470), bringing it to 14 cores and 28 threads **•** 192GB DDR3L ECC **•** LSI 9207-8i in IT mode for ZFS **•** X520-DA2 for 10G into the aggregation switch **•** Coral USB TPU for Frigate **•** Z-Wave and Zigbee dongles passed through to the Home Assistant VM **•** It runs Home Assistant, AdGuard, Frigate, and Immich. The Pi 4 is retired. **•** Still to come: RTX 3060 12GB for local LLM inference 

Next project: A fully local family AI assistant. The T420 and 3060 will run Ollama and Whisper. Three OptiPlex 7060 Micros will handle Qdrant, n8n/LangGraph orchestration, and Open WebUI with Piper TTS. Nothing leaves the house.

Lessons so far:

**•** The TP-Link SX3008F had to go because it has no RJ45 SFP support. It couldn't talk to the Firewalla natively. **•** The USP-RPS isn't compatible with the Pro Max 16 or the Pro 24. **•** Fresh Reolink cams refuse local connections until you activate them in the app. **•** Moving the Z-Wave and Zigbee dongles from the Pi to Proxmox USB passthrough went fine. 

Happy to answer questions. Roast my cable management gently.