New build house - with Home Hub Installation updated with pics

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Fibre was run through the loft and down into my sever cabinet behind the rack. Nice clean install. No wires running through the house, only a little in the garage but oh well, it was the best that could be done.

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Yesterday an Openreach engineer came round to complete my FTTP install. It was a different engineer from the first visit. He was pleasantly surprised that all the hard work was already done for him. All he had to do was put a connector at the end of the fibre cable, screw the ONT to the wall and switch me on! The engineer also did a light meter test on the cable and said the reading was almost perfect, so no damage to the cable and very little signal attenuation in the cable. Which was good to hear! and a quick speed test showing I'm getting the speeds that I am paying for! Feels good to be back in the fast lane. I missed having a fast internet connection ever since I moved into the new house! We had Virgin Media broadband in the previous house with similar speeds and that was pretty good, it did go down probably once a year but the speeds were rock solid, hope BT fibre is all that its cracked up to be and is as reliable as VM were!

Can I ask what are the monthly costs for FTTP
 
Can I ask what are the monthly costs for FTTP

obviously depends on the package, current prices are below, includes line rental for BT landline, plus they have some cashback offers going at the moment. I managed to get £120 mastercard cash back, and a months free service and got an upgrade deal for £45.99 a month which includes the cost of the Landline.

36mb 29.99
50mb 35.99
67mb 39.99
145mb 54.99
300mb 59.99
 
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It’s great to be able to finally work from the home office without any bandwidth issues now that I have a decent internet connection! Really enjoying it!
 
310Mbps, I speed I can only dream of...

We only have FTTC here and my house is about as far away from the cabinet as you can get so I am limited to an absolute maximum of 22Mbps.
 
obviously depends on the package, current prices are below, includes line rental for BT landline, plus they have some cashback offers going at the moment. I managed to get £120 mastercard cash back, and a months free service and got an upgrade deal for £45.99 a month which includes the cost of the Landline.

36mb 29.99
50mb 35.99
67mb 39.99
145mb 54.99
300mb 59.99

Thanks and that’s a really good price you’ve got!
 
Absolutely love your thread here and I am very jealous. We bought a new build in 2016 and were told CAT6 wasn't an option. After some back and forth they eventually agreed to quote for it but they wants £1500 for about 6 points. I work in IT and I know that's a a crazy price. So I declined and installed the few I needed urgently myself after we completed.

We are now buying a new house on the same development and will be in a similar situation. They won't allow cabling at all. The only glimmer of hope I have is that since we've been here I've spoken with the site manager a lot. I'm hoping he will at least allow additional steel channeling to be installed so I can more easily run the cables I need. The biggest problem I had was running cables from the loft to the ground floor rooms so I'm hoping we can sort something out. In an ideal world I would be allowed to install the cables myself but insurance will be the problem.
 
The biggest problem I had was running cables from the loft to the ground floor rooms so I'm hoping we can sort something out.

We moved into another new build house in March of this year. My server kit is in the garage, and my new office is the other side of the house. I know it won't be a solution to suit everyone - but I popped a small hole in my garage wall, and ran the cable up the side of the house and into the loft. From there, I was easily able to run the cables to my office, and indeed Cat6\coax etc into each upstairs bedroom. I didn't want the cables being left out in the elements, so I chased them through a drainpipe - I now have a waterproof, weatherproof, large bore conduit!

As a plus, I've now decided I want power in the loft, and the electrical fusebox is in the garage, so I can add an electrical run into the loft via the same route and just pop it on a new, seperate RCD.
 
We moved into another new build house in March of this year. My server kit is in the garage, and my new office is the other side of the house. I know it won't be a solution to suit everyone - but I popped a small hole in my garage wall, and ran the cable up the side of the house and into the loft. From there, I was easily able to run the cables to my office, and indeed Cat6\coax etc into each upstairs bedroom. I didn't want the cables being left out in the elements, so I chased them through a drainpipe - I now have a waterproof, weatherproof, large bore conduit!

As a plus, I've now decided I want power in the loft, and the electrical fusebox is in the garage, so I can add an electrical run into the loft via the same route and just pop it on a new, seperate RCD.

I have a 25mm conduit for the 4 CAT6 cables I have going to the garage but I didn’t want to use the same method for the ground floor rooms.
 
Absolutely love your thread here and I am very jealous. We bought a new build in 2016 and were told CAT6 wasn't an option. After some back and forth they eventually agreed to quote for it but they wants £1500 for about 6 points. I work in IT and I know that's a a crazy price. So I declined and installed the few I needed urgently myself after we completed.

We are now buying a new house on the same development and will be in a similar situation. They won't allow cabling at all. The only glimmer of hope I have is that since we've been here I've spoken with the site manager a lot. I'm hoping he will at least allow additional steel channeling to be installed so I can more easily run the cables I need. The biggest problem I had was running cables from the loft to the ground floor rooms so I'm hoping we can sort something out. In an ideal world I would be allowed to install the cables myself but insurance will be the problem.

Thanks for the complement. Yes it was just the best thing ever to be able to have the option to install cat6/coax/speaker cabling as part of the build process so everything is built into the walls before we moved in. I know the pain I went through in my previous house, having to do the cat6 cabling in terms of being able to hide the cables from view, so I jumped on this regardless of the high installation cost and I am so glad I did.

If your site manager doesn't allow you to install any trunking etc. it might be worth giving the company we used (home hub installations) a call if you need to do the cabling post the build completion, they are experts in cabling new build homes, might be worth having a chat?

The only piece of advice I can give you is to install more cat6 than you currently need, but I know that you already know that seeing that you work in I.T, you just never know in the future you may need more network points. For example I had 2 network points installed in the office and both are used up now, I could do with a couple of more dedicated points, I know this can be solved with a small inexpensive switch to give me the additional ports that I need, but I prefer to have a direct connection where possible!

Keep us posted with the progress you make on your house.
 
Decided the noise level coming out of my Hikvision NVR was unacceptable as I am quite sensitive to fan noise and found it to be rather loud and irritating.

The OEM case fan is 40X10mm with a standard 2 pin power connector which fits on to the motherboard. The motherboard contains a standard 2pin fan connector but will accept a standard PC fan with a 3 pin connector (3rd pin will be unused).

The OEM PSU fan is 40X20mm but contains a proprietary 2 pin power connector which connects to the inside board of the PSU. So you cannot simply connect a standard PC fan to the PSU. To get around this you would have to cut the existing fan cable and solder or jelly crimp it on to your replacement fan due to the proprietary fan connector or alternatively if you are only using one hard drive in your NVR you can use the spare SATA power connector with a SATA to Fan connector adapter to power the replacement PSU fan directly from one of the two SATA power cables inside the NVR. This is exactly what I did as I thought this method would be easier to swap out fans if needed in future or if I had to send the unit back for a warranty claim, I can simply put the original fan back in without any issues.

The replacement fans I bought are from Noctua, along with a Noctua SATA to 4pin power adapter to use with the replacement PSU fan. The Noctua fans were a little lower in terms of CFM in comparison to the original fan specs, but I'm not too worried about that as the PSU is rated at 190W continuous, and I am only using 30watts combined from the 5x POE cameras that I have in my home, so I'm hardly stressing the PSU at all.

With the fans replaced, the noise level has been reduced massively, its not silent, I can still hear the whirr of air coming from the fans but it is very quite now and definitely worth replacing.


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It wouldn't be an option getting a third party in to do the work. The best I can hope for is the trucking unfortunately. I'm really hoping he will agree to that.

As for your NVR upgrade, I have the same if not similar model and I to hate the noise. I will probably upgrade the fans as you have so thanks :)
 
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Been busy updating some of my office gear over the holiday season, thought I would share as I haven’t updated this thread in a while. Upgraded my workstation monitor to an LG 27” 4K UHD HDR monitor. I swapped out the standard monitor base for a vesa desk mount which gives it that cool floating effect....

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Upgraded my workstation’s internals so I can rip and transfer 4K movies faster to my NAS with a more powerful 8th Gen 6core intel CPU, put in a faster SSD, a silent GPU to run the 4K monitor and couple of Intel X540-T2 10GBE network cards for the PC and my new Synology DS 1819+

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After moving the 4x10TB disks out of my old 4bay nas into the new 8bay I was getting about 475MB/s write and 550MB/s read speeds. I then put in another 10TB disk in it taking it to 5 disks populated and now I‘m getting about 810MB/s read speeds from the NAS and copying to it at 550MB/s, got another 3 more 10TB disks to put in, the raid rebuild takes a couple of days, once complete I reckon I will be bottlenecked by the 10gbe network card in the PC and NAS on reads maxing out at 1000MB/s and around 650MB/s on writes over my wired CAT6 home network.
 
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What is the disk array configured as?

Just having difficulties with my desktop on a X520 going past 3.5Gbps on Iperf to my server.

Need to figure out why :(
 
What is the disk array configured as?

Just having difficulties with my desktop on a X520 going past 3.5Gbps on Iperf to my server.

Need to figure out why :(

Synology's own raid system called SHR with 1 disk redundancy. Its basically RAID 5 but with the added benefit of being able to mix and match different drive sizes, the most important benefit of SHR raid being you are able to increase the volume capacity and use all the availble space minus the largest drive for redundancy.

 
What is the disk array configured as?

Just having difficulties with my desktop on a X520 going past 3.5Gbps on Iperf to my server.

Need to figure out why :(

what ssd is in your desktop? previously I had a single samsung evo 860 and that topped out around 500MB/s read/write. Not fast enough to saturate a 10gbe link. So you will need to move to an NVME drive or raid 0 a couple standard ssd's in order to be able to get a sustained read/write speeds of over a 1000MB/s to be able to saturate a 10gbe link.
 
what ssd is in your desktop? previously I had a single samsung evo 860 and that topped out around 500MB/s read/write. Not fast enough to saturate a 10gbe link. So you will need to move to an NVME drive or raid 0 a couple standard ssd's in order to be able to get a sustained read/write speeds of over a 1000MB/s to be able to saturate a 10gbe link.

It's a Samsung SM951 so should be capable of saturating a 10Gb link in both directions assuming the other end is capable. Also have an nvme in my mac book pro which will hit 6Gbps to the server (when Norton is switched off :thumbsdow).

Iperf didn't use the disk though so that shouldn't be a limiting factor. CPU is not bottlenecking but needs further investigation. Unfortunate my rack epdu has decided to kill off 4 output ports so trying to recover that at the moment.
 
It's a Samsung SM951 so should be capable of saturating a 10Gb link in both directions assuming the other end is capable. Also have an nvme in my mac book pro which will hit 6Gbps to the server (when Norton is switched off :thumbsdow).

Iperf didn't use the disk though so that shouldn't be a limiting factor. CPU is not bottlenecking but needs further investigation. Unfortunate my rack epdu has decided to kill off 4 output ports so trying to recover that at the moment.

The SM951 is a very fast ssd and will have no probs saturating a 10gbe link in either direction. What about the disks in your server? I assume they are 7200rpm drives and you've got 5+ disks in the array?

If using mechanical drives you're going to need at least six 7200rpm disks in an non-encrypted array to be able to saturate a 10gbe link on reads from the server and at least 10 disks to saturate a 10gbe link on writes. Different story if using SSD's in the server.
 
Yep 6 x 12TB drives in RAID5 on a decent raid card with a 2GB cache.

But iperf doesn't use the drives anyway so it's a bit of a moot point on that. I am wondering if it is just my desktop being a bit rubbish.
 
Yep 6 x 12TB drives in RAID5 on a decent raid card with a 2GB cache.

But iperf doesn't use the drives anyway so it's a bit of a moot point on that. I am wondering if it is just my desktop being a bit rubbish.

yea you're right iperf think it uses ramdisk for the tests, so it cant be that, not sure what it could be then, doubt its the cabling. As long as you've got a decent quad core CPU and a fast SSD, which you have, it should be enough. Mine is just an intel i5 Core 8500 6 core CPU so its decent enough, but I've checked my cpu usage during transfers and it doesnt go above 20%. Check your network card settings, RSS ques match the number of cpu cores, enable Jumbo frames 9000k, and increase the transmit and receive side scaling. But really those settings don't make a huge difference at all.
 
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Got rid of the BT supplied router and fitted Unifi UAP-AC-HD along with Unify USG Pro 4 rackmount router. Now getting full line speed over wifi 300/50! Was previously 75-90!

I posted some of these already over at the Networking/NAS thread as setting up the router wasn't as straight forward as I initially thought and the guys over there helped me out. All working nicely now.
 
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Was initially going to get the USG3 but went with the Pro 4, so glad I did as it has a bit more grunt than the v3. The noise coming out of the stock fans were unbearable, I could hear the high pitched screaching sound from the office next foor! So I did a noctua fan upgrade and its whisper quite. The same as my NVR, can't hear it with the doors closed, with the doors open, you can just hear a melow whisper of air, very quite! Also got a good improvement in CPU temps a nice drop of 6 to 7 degrees Celsius which gives it a little more headroom!
 
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Lovely set up!

I also work from home and lucky enough to have 1gb up/down connection.
If I ever move it's going to be a nightmare losing that!

I also love Ubiquiti stuff although I'm only using their residential Amplifi but it's been rock solid and revolutionised my wi-fi.
Was tempted to get their new Dream Machine but then saw the Alien which isnt out here yet.

Anyway great set up pal, nice job, lovely thread and great choice of equipment
 

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