I have a dream, a dream of a sports and Esports gaming center with the world's fastest WiFi, with an incredible whole building audio setup, 4K cameras, and stupid fast fiber optic networking everywhere. To be clear, the dream is still alive, but as you can see, we are painfully behind schedule. The power's not finished, the date is barely half run, and they are still today putting in the boxes that our Wi-Fi is supposed to amount to. And somehow, we are supposed to be soft opening at the end of next month. But we have a plan. With the help of EcoFlow, who sponsored this video and sent over their awesome new Delta Pro 3 smart battery backup to give us power while we work, I and the tech Avengers here are going to be hopefully solving some of our problems and getting this train back on the tracks. And by hopefully, I mean we have to, because starting tomorrow, Jake and I are each going to be out of office for two weeks to get 100% completion of this.

part of the project. We need a rack, two wall racks, nine patch panels, 200 terminations, four fiber Bays, eight Network switches, 200 patch cables. Let's just see how far we get. Um, the good news is the rack will at least be a little bit easier than last time thanks to an awesome new technology. Um, that, okay, it's kind of like that tool for eating, you know, but like huge, like a fork. Yeah, yeah, that's how we got it up here. Cool, right? Okay, maybe there's a little bit of movement still. Oh, yeah, it's got to go in that room, huh? Oh, jeez, I just need to get under it. Okay, one moment, please. Okay, wow, we good, we good. Yeah, yeah, you're good, yeah, buddy. And now it's on Wheels. Hey, thanks, Hammond Manufacturing. This is part of their H1 series of data center cabinets. It's 42 rack units plus these cool six extra ones on the side that honestly don't even make it that much wider, which should be enough for all the

networking server equipment and battery backup that we'll need for our badminton and pickleball business, and hopefully, Esports gaming events. Assuming the city of Siri gets on board, knock on wood, metal wood. Speaking of networking, I hope we have a plan for all of this. Hey, it's not so bad. Some of it's going downstairs. Why did we bring it up here? Thing is, in a building this big, you don't have the option of home running everything to the same server room because some of the Ethernet runs are longer than the maximum supported distance. One way around this is to use fiber optics, and in some cases where we need very high-speed connectivity over a great distance, that makes a ton of sense. But in most situations within this building, it doesn't. So instead of us trying to work out how to adapt a fiber cable into every single security camera, we built this closet that is also going to be packed with networking. Realistically, we probably could have crammed a regular floor-standing rack in here, but as someone who has done that in

the past in a room this size, it really sucks, and this is just for Network stuff anyway, so instead we opted for a pair of these hammonded wall-mounted vertical racks. This side over here is primarily going to be for the fiber that connects this room to the main server room, as well as the fiber that connects it to the second wall for gaming events that we're hoping to be able to host. Massive shout out, by the way, to infinite cables. When I first heard their name, I didn't really take it seriously, but given how much they've sent us for this project, I think it might be literal. I think their supply of cables is infinite. So anything on this side of the courts or in the office up front that's going to the server room right over there, everything else is going to terminate into this little Network closet right here that is smack dab in the middle between the two units going into a switch, which effectively resets our maximum distance. Then we have a high-speed fiber link that goes back to

the main server room where Jake is the last piece. We need for the fiber side is this UniFi high-capacity aggregation switch. It's got 20 8 10 gig SFP plus ports, and then it's got four 25 gig SFP 28 ports. These are the ones that are going to run back to the server room. The rest of these are going to be short fiber patch cables from this to the other side where we're going to have all of our copper. And that's going to be for our Wi-Fi access points, our security cameras. I don't know if we have a POS terminal in the concession stand. POS, that kind of no not piece of oh point of it's the same thing because so many of the devices on this side can be powered with their network cable using PoE. We're going to be using their Pro Max 48 PoE. This thing is sick. It's got a total of 48 PoE ports, 32 of them are 1 gig with looks like eight of them supporting PoE+.

plus, so that's higher power devices. It's got 16 that run at 2 and a half gig. That's perfect for our Wi-Fi 7 access points. And then it's got a handful of SFP plus ports that run at 10 gigs. So if we were to trunk all of these, then we could have up to 40 gigs on our Uplink here, which is way more than we would need. Probably the coolest thing about this though is that it has RGB lighting. And not in like a silly, you know, for gamers way. What do they call it, ether lighting, lighting something like that? It's diagnostic. So it works best when paired with their patch cords that are clear and translucent. So it kind of catches the light. You can pick a port in their software and go, Go show me that one. Or you can color all your APS green and your security cameras purple. Or since the low voltage construction Lads are terminating fiber in the main server room right now, we kind of don't want to get in their way. So we're going to be

building up the rack in the corner office here. Jake's got all the gear that he's going to be populating it with kind of laid out here. Actually, this is not even all. There's more awesome. So, I'm going to leave him to that for now. What he's going to need in order to make sure any of it works though is power, which is going to be provided by our ecoflow Delta Pro 3. We were originally thinking of deploying this thing as part of the W show set so that we could make the ultimate Unstoppable W show. Like seriously, we could broadcast the entire show off of this thing plus the battery units that Jake has over there. Do you want to bring those in, Jake? Yeah, sure. Fantastic. That feels great, doesn't it? Here you go. Okay, basically they're ip65 rated and we've got a total of 12 kwatt hours of battery in the pack that we've got here. Let us know in the comments if you still want to see us do that wow setup, but for now, this was great timing.

for us to be able to test this stuff while the power to the building isn't fully hooked up yet. So we'll be running entirely off of these pre-charged batteries for today. But in the long term, this has a ton of flexibility in terms of power inputs. It comes with a standard nonproprietary c19 charging cable, and with an upgraded cable like this one from infinite cables, it can do up to 4,000-watt Max AC charging speed. And yes, supports both 120 and 240 volts. It can also get power with Solar Direct from your car's alternator. Uh, it can use EV charging, it can use your car's 12-volt outlet, and it can even use a gas generator. Most importantly for us, though, it has a sub-10 millisecond transfer time, meaning that it behaves about like a proper server UPS. So even if the power does go out or you know doesn't exist in the first place, our networking equipment should perform flawlessly. And with an output of 4,000 watts, you can even power

High wattage appliances like AC units, water pumps, fridges, and more. Of course, Jake also needs internet, which he's told me is going to be a bit of an adventure. So, while he works on building out the rack, I guess I'm going to go figure that out. So, the server room is way on the other end of that wall, and our internet connection comes in here where AJ from the Floatplane SL LMG INFR team. Everything, yeah, whatever. AJ is going to help us get from this box to there. Yeah, but it's not that simple. No, 'cause we are running single-mode fiber up to the room. Problem, this single-mode, yes. So, everything's great, no. This is an APCSC cable, and we're trying to run it to an LC adapter. Uh-huh, but we don't have it yet. So, what we're going to try to do is take this cable and splice it with what Infinite Cable provided, which is fast connect kits. And yeah, we'll see how it goes and hopefully it works, and we have internet. So, we're just

going to hope that even though I've never terminated fiber before that I'm going to pull it off. Yes, so I have to get this on onto the fiber that's in there. Yes, it's a fast connect. How the this is fast. Oh, you got it. And it's not long enough, I think. No, no, that's fine. That's fine. That's good. You know what, this was a practice run. Don't even worry, AJ. Dude, we got this. We're unstoppable. You know the success chance are very slim. Um, we're trying our best, but I don't think we're doing this the right way, dude. To all the professionals watching this saying, hey, they're doing it wrong, we know. We're just trying stuff. We're trying stuff. You got to try stuff in life. While Lina sorts out that side of the internet, let's talk about this side for our router and I mean controller. This thing does a lot. We're using a pretty new device. This is called the Dream Machine Pro Max. And if you're not

familiar with Ubiquiti Dream Machine lineup. It's a router controller, kind of NVR, which is for security camera recording switch. All in one. They also upgraded the CPU. So instead of around 3.5 Gbit of intrusion detection prevention, this one can do about 5 Gbit. And it can firewall and route at full 10 gig, which with the little 10 gig ports we've got here should be perfect for our application. Except we have not just one, but two. Next up is a fiber LGX. I don't know what LGX stands for off the top of my head, but it's basically a fancy thing to hold fiber cables, kind of more properly. You've probably seen us in the past just use a normal like Ethernet patch panel with keystones, which works, but not the best because it's not really protected. And since we have a lot of armored fiber coming in here, they can actually just poke the armor straight into this box. And then inside the fiber will spool up in here and be protected.

behind, and all we have in the front is just little patch cases. Now that the fiber LGX patch Bay thingies are installed, we can talk about our core switch. It's the same switch that was downstairs, literally. Turns out the plan kind of changed, and all the fiber is coming up here, so we stole the high-cap irrigation we showed you downstairs, and we're putting it up here. This is going to be our core switch, so the internet comes into this guy, and then all of the other switches in the building, even the ones downstairs, are going to connect into this directly. So every single switch in the building, it's going to look like one big branch off of this one. It just makes kind of management easier. So even though we're going to have a bunch of extra ports on here, and we could use those for the fibers down there, we just want to keep everything that's access like a device plugs into it separate from this core switch, just to make maintenance a little bit easier and kind of the topology a

little bit simpler. Our stack is droo. Our this whole thing is just look at how bad this is. I know it's, oh, I'm actually a little worried about that. That looks like it's going to bend. Turns out it's kind of our fault. We didn't order the blanking panels that are supposed to go here and reinforce this if you're not using it. So for now, we're going to just try and stick the gear in and see what happens. If it doesn't work, we'll have to like distribute some of the load in the parts that are better reinforced and then change it later. About a painstaking hour later, we have almost everything installed. We've got all of our switches and most of our patch panels. And fortunately, it's, it's a lot less sketch now. I mean it's still a little bit sketch. They're going to send us the blanking panels which will help that, but it is far more stable. And the last piece, at least for now, is these nvrs we're using standard ubiquity nvrs even though

they have a pro NVR that is to use. I just like using the standard ones because you can do two and then stack them together in software so that you get the performance of having multiple discrete units. They act like one in software um and you can fit more hard drives. Speaking of hard drives, we're going to be using these Cate 22 terabytes, which seems like overkill and it's because it is. Thanks to Cate for sending these over. We're going to equip each of them with four, so we'll have like 100 terabytes almost or 90 terabytes almost in each unit. I should be quite a bit of camera capacity. I don't know if I mentioned this yet, but the ecoflow has this wonderful 240 208 volt 30 amp plug in the front. So we got an adapter. This is l1430 to l630 and then we just had a random pdu, which is just fancy term for big ass power bar, uh and we're going to leave that in the back of the rack for.

now long term, we have proper like networked PDU, so we can like turn off a port if we want if something's broken and not responding to power cycle it. But for now, this will allow us to turn things on and try it out. We have 7.6 days of power. Oh, we have 32 days of power. Look at that, it's all off battery. Thanks EcoFlow. I feel the Eco flowing through me right now. Do you feel it, Sean? I feel something, but not sure if it's Eco. Oh, if you hit me in the face, I'll give you 20 bucks. Hey, that sounds like a deal. Close ah, it's not bad, eh? Boom. You have no idea how easy this is going to be. I, for many years, have hated cable managing Network racks, but no longer. Boom, done. Boom. It's managed. It might not be managed well, but it only took seconds. And if I need to change it again, like maybe to do it proper, L boom. Pretty cool, huh? LTT store.com, which will be linked down in the

description along with links to all the other stuff we installed which is going to be a very long list. At this point, I'd love to do a little check-in with Dan. Yeah, you told me about our amazing, you know, IP speaker system and all of, oh my goodness, these are really big. They're so green. They are very green. So they're from SoundTube Entertainment. Who the devil are they and what's good about this? I don't know. Are we doing a test with the speakers today? I would hope so. Do you have PoE? I would hope so. There's, there's no, um, there's nothing in the ceiling. We're going to have these pretty much everywhere. So this is not going to be the kind of place where, you know, could the owner of a super loud BMW please be less of a jackass. Are we allowed to say that about Jake if you can't hear us? Oh, probably. He'll review the video. Wow, nice rack. It is, dude. Look at, look at how mint it is. There's definitely no flex there's a little bit of flex, yeah.

we're missing the like right the blocking panels. I mean whatever, but everything's plugged in and MCM cable managed. We're just waiting for you to mount an access point and then do we get to do a Wi-Fi test. Yes, awesome. You should go do that. Uh, see you later. Now I've ridden a scissor lift before, but I have never gone this high. The ceiling here is 32 ft, which is a little over 9 m. I mean solid right now. I got to tell you I've overcome a lot thanks to my years as a painter, but my natural state is to be quite distressed by heights. Um, and this is by far the highest I've ever gone in a scissor lift. [Music] Okay, I just I just want to hold on to this. Okay, I do not like this. Okay, what am I supposed to do? Terminate a cable and install the AP. I am so unhappy right now. I don't think I could be less happy. Yes, I could be less happy. Um, there could be a cactus in my right now now while I'm doing this.

I would be less happy, but I am pretty unhappy. Andrew, you worked construction, do you, are you like comfortable with this? Yeah, I don't mind this at all. Yeah, okay. Well, you know what, good for you. Don't suppose you guys sent me up here with a testing tool or anything, huh? No, I forgot, sorry. Yeah, cool, that's fine. So the testing tool is just you plugging the WAP. It should light, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. WAP has a really different meaning in English now. Don't call it a WAP. She's plugged, come on, baby, please work. Hey, there it is there, good enough, right? Beautiful. Hey, we did it. Okay, let's get the hell out of here. Okay, please God, for once in your life. Oh, me, I could have handed it to him in a less precarious way. Why did you give it to me with all these pieces? I just need the phone 'cause it's okay. Speed test, let's go. Woo, how fast is it going? 1.3, 1 point 1.3 gigabit, damn, damn. What's our internet?

speed here 3 gig 3 gig all right oh yeah you're so you're connected to the same AP as me you're at I'd set that to 6 GHz 320 wide I only got 300 up it's is our connection symmetric yes but you might be far away and 6 GHz is very low range yes okay fair enough well I can fix that we're closer to a gig and a half now download 1.43 and my upload is about 550 megabit I have some bad news yeah so while you are testing Wi-Fi 7 they haven't released firmer with mlo or multi-link operation yet which is what allows you to connect to like 5 GHz and 6 GHz at the same time and maybe get like 2 gabit over Wi-Fi uh they don't have that yet all right oh no way so these new APS the U7 Pro Max have a dedicated radio for scanning oh cool so they can scan all the time you don't have to like pause the Wi-Fi to scan so if you're

having Wi-Fi problems you can go pick the AP that's closest to it and see what the hell's going on. very cool you don't even need a wipy or a Wi-Fi man which is ubiquity equivalent product. now some of you might have noticed that this is extremely Overkill. the fact that we've got four APS out in this Warehouse. we've got another one on the mezzanine that we're standing on but assuming we get our land gaming events going we could have hundreds of people in here and that's where the additional APS are going to make a big difference. other than that it's very similar to the U6 Enterprises which we have everywhere we love those things. the only real difference is it's Wi-Fi 7 which is flipping awesome. yeah it's like theoretically 20% faster than Wi-Fi 6 kind of out of the gate assuming the device supports it. and then once mlo is enabled yeah I've seen results that are well in excessive you know 2 gabit per

second Wi-Fi real world guys now there's multiple different ways that MLL can be used and one of the big ones is latency. Imagine this in Wi-Fi if you're not familiar. It's not like an ethernet cable. If somebody's using it to a certain degree, you have to wait for them to be done. That's what makes Wi-Fi High latency sometimes and not so much others. Imagine now you can go, Oh, this radio is in use. Okay, let me go to this other one, the 6 GHz band. Now you have 50 devices that are using your, you know, 4x4 thing and your latency is low, incredible. I'm just curious how much battery we have left on this thing. We still have 92% battery and we've been messing around with this all day. 300 watts, 1.3 days. That is awesome. Below 2,000 Watts, it's not supposed to go above 30 DB 'cause they have like this crazy cooling setup. And if you look at the front, you see that

Grill. If you look in that grill, you see the fans in there. They're like, there's like two 92 mil fans in there. Oh yeah, look at them go. They look hefty. Where's X boost? The app for the one that I have in my car is like super simple. You can't do a lot with it, but it just works. Oh, so simple, right? This thing can boost to like 8,000 Watts if you need for a little bit, which is kind of insane. All right, the big thing is if we had the actual proper plug, yeah, we could turn this up to the full 4,000 WTS and it'll pull that 208 volt 30 amp right from the wall. Actually, I think we need 240 volt for that. But for now, if we were just to plug it into a normal plug, right, just go down like watt, or if you have a lot of other things on the circuit, you could set it to 600 watts, just knowing that it's going to take longer, but you're not

going to try up your breaker right especially since you have that giant battery cache if you need to draw 1,000 Watts for an hour or whatever it's fine it will just refill when it is lower. The electronic strike doesn't fit in the door what how does that happen do we have we don't know they they built it and the strike does not fit. For those not familiar an electric strike is a little module that goes in here that's powered that allows you to unlock a door with you know a fob or uh your phone or whatever the case may be yeah yeah hey yeah there we go okay and so our problem is that this no fit it kind of looks like it could maybe when you take this off there's an interior Gang Box here's the plan we already opened this one anyway so let's wire it up so we can show the fine folks how our ubiquity access is going to work and how it will just release this thing and a door will open and we'll just get different

electric strikes that actually fit in our doors. Later, we can do that. Nice. I'm glad we're finding out today and not a month from now. sh Shadow mode, right? We know Shadow mode. We're familiar, do we? Shadow mode is taking your UniFi router, SLC controller, SL protect camera monitoring system, basically your dream machine, and synchronizing it to another one. Now, it's not real-time redundant like if one goes down, just boom, immediate automatic failover, at least not yet. But what it is, wait, wait, wait. Oh, well, you didn't let me get. Oh, did I ruin the surprise? Yeah. Oh, well. Okay, sort of the way that it's set up right now. Yeah, it is just like a warm spare. It's a warm spare, but in the current like Alpha 4.0, you can do automatic high availability failover. That's awesome. So, it wires up exactly like you'd expect. You have the two cables from whatever your internet box is. The two are connected together, and then one from each to whatever switch.

you have and then boom. It just does. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, ubiquity is moving from, you know, high-end consumer SL, SMB to like, for real though. Yeah. Oh, do we still have the film on the camera? It's in there, maybe. Oh, you guys, you got a cover on the camera. You better make an entertaining face, otherwise this was all for nothing. Oh, jeez. I was right. Absolute dork. Is this thing on? Hey, not bad. It's not bad, actually. All right, yeah. No, I think we're pretty good. Yeah, but if I want to see the lights on the rack, well, the rack's going to be in the middle of the room. Oh, all right, right there. Yeah, that's pretty good. Awesome, that looks great. But what about access control? It turns out that the doors that we installed have all the room in the world for our electric strikes, but the doors that were part of the base building before we started doing our improvements are different ones. So we just have to source some different strikes for those, but for now.

we should be able to just like do this, right? Oh, did you unlock it? Oh no, ow, what? Got to tell me if you're going to unlock it. I was like, I was showing that it was locked. Of course, it's not that impressive to be able to press a button on your computer and unlock the door. I mean, we had that technology 30 years ago. What's really impressive is that we can use either NFC fobs or phones. Or even if you know it's not one that requires authentication, a wave of a hand like for exit. Actually, how cool is that, right? Pretty good. The plan is to have access control on basically every door in the building. And the reason for that is that our goal is to allow members to have 24/7 access, but only to the parts that allowed to have access to. And that might change. So, if there's a land event going on on the one side, right? Then no badminton members do not need to be going in there for security reasons. So, no one gets their computer stolen.

depending on what's going on in the building, we could have very different levels of access for different people who carry fobs or who have the app on their phone, right? So we don't know how much, if any, of that is ultimately going to be rolled out, but we wanted to be ready for it, and we didn't want to be retrofitting the building. You wanted to have the flexibility to do whatever you want to be able to do. Yes, gotcha, that makes sense. Flexibility can be very expensive. The camera down here is a different model, too. That's the Dome. We needed cameras down here that were tamper-resistant, like they have a cover, 'cause the turret ones you could just go up and just move it out of the way, right? This one has a cover so you can't just screw with it down here. Got it, yeah. I mean, realistically, we understand there's going to be some shrink. Any retail operation has some, but we'd like to minimize it, and we'd like to know who's causing trouble, right? We are going

to have pretty much a blanket policy that anyone who walks through the door is going to be registered. Even if they don't pay for a higher chair of membership, right? So don't imagine that you're going to be coming back if you get in trouble. The bad news is we didn't get everything done today, but the good news is that leaves lots of content for the next Vlog. Setting things up here, which is probably going to be speakers. Yeah, I'm really excited about that setup. Yeah. Oh my God, there's so much more to do. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out the uh Linus improves his house playlist. It was this kind of chaos, but on a smaller scale. Yeah, equally as painful.

My Wifi is Better than Yours

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
