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Multiple punchdowns vs brush panels (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by Materidan@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

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As I plan my first rack for my new home, I find myself waffling on how to handle certain wiring. I won’t have “easy” access to the rear, so I prefer most things up front for diagnosis/management. Which means house wiring I plan to terminate in keystone punchdown panels up front. That’s fine. I’ll have the rack space to burn.

But then I have more awkward situations. Such as the hardwired security camera lines that need to feed to the back of the POE NVR.

Would you just terminate the lines and plug them in? Only issue is if I want to manually power cycle a camera I have to pull the rack out. So then maybe terminate house wiring in a punchdown up front and run a line from that back through a brush plate to the NVR. But are brush plates going to look messy? So then just to add needless points of failure, I could bring the NVR’s ports up to maybe a coupler panel and then jumper between them. That would look pretty, but… add so many connections.

How would you handle this sort of thing?

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[–] tmat256 1 points 1 year ago

Traditionally all incoming lines into a server room or wiring closet gets punched down to a panel in the rack and then jumpers are wired to everything in the rack. You never put an end on a cable that came out of a wall. The idea being you would have maybe 5 feet of extra cable in a loop behind the rack in case you needed to reorganize the room in the future. It sucks pulling cable, so leave some extra.

If there were multiple racks then usually one of them was just for wires and switches and the others were for servers. I usually used different color cables for different things too (like use orange for links between switches and blue for servers, etc), but for a home rack I wouldn't bother with that. Different color zip ties on cables can be handy too.