AC Vent Register Booster, improved cooling in my equipment closet

[FlyingPenguin]

A lot of my networking gear, and two NAS servers, and CCTV is all located near the ceiling of my tall pantry closet in the new house. When we built the house I didn't take into consideration how hot it would get in there. To be fair, there is a LOT more gear in there now than there used to be.

Temps up near the equipment were around 89C sometimes, when the AC wasn't cycling.

The room does have an AC vent, but it was a small bathroom 8 x 4 vent. I had my HVAC company install a larger 10 x 6 vent and increase the size of the duct attached to it, accordingly.

This helped a lot, but temps would still go up and down a lot between AC cycles. Temps would drop down to 76 F when the AC was running (house thermostat is set to 74), but would come up to 84 F when the AC wasn't running.

I wanted to have some kind of constant ventilation, without installing a vent and fan between the closet and the hallway (my wife would have killed me).

What I wound up using was this register booster fan:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/AC-Infinity- ... /120962022

It replaced the vent cover, and has two 100mm PC case type fans, and normally you would configure it so it only runs if the temperature probe detects cooler air coming from the duct (or warmer if you live up north and using this on a furnace vent). However, there is a fan bypass mode that just runs the fan continuously at an adjustable speed, and this is what I'm using. My idea was, that even if the AC is not running, it will pull in cooler air from the adjacent rooms through the duct, and at least ventilate the room.

I have the fan set to run at 90%, which is not terribly more noisy than all the other equipment fans running in there, and it pulls in quit a lot of air. Temps now vary between 72 F when the AC is running (yeah, cooler than the house thermostat) and 77 when the AC is not running, which is a huge improvement.

This unit would certainly help if used as intended, and you have a weak AC vent on one end of your house. When the AC is running, it really pulls in a lot of air - a lot more than normal.

[Executioner]

How much fun would that be to troubleshoot all those connections and cables.

[FlyingPenguin]

Just had to. I was having a persistent issue with the webcam and tablets I use as a baby monitor in my Dad's room. The video would keep locking up after a few hours. I had been blaming it the last month on the app, but then I noticed the other day that anything on Wifi that tried to pull more than 7Mbit/s would bring down everything on the dedicated POE (Power over ethernet) switch I have all the access points connected to. Turned out to be a bad switch.

Swapped out the switch and everything is back to normal.

I actually have everything well labelled, and even a diagram on the wall in case I drop dead and the wife needs to bring in a tech to troubleshoot. Pretty much the same thing I did for business clients.

[Executioner]

How long did it take to set all that up, or was it as you go you kept adding devices?

[FlyingPenguin]

Initial setup was simpler: 2 switches (trusted & untrusted network), no NAS servers, and it was a joy to setup in the same way I install network panels in businesses. I located the main cable TV amplifier in there for ease of access, as well as the security camera CCTV DVR, and a small punch block for the two phone lines. Spent a week initially setting up most of it initially.

I planned for some expansion, but it quickly grew out of hand, and I've added a lot over the past few years. Despite all the network jacks I ran in the house when it was built, I actually needed to run more later. Remember: "No plan survives contact with the enemy."

Now there's 4 switches total instead of 2 (added a 2.5GB switch just for the file server, workstation & gaming PC, and a POE switch to power the access points), added a whole separate network for HDMI over Ethernet so you can watch the CCTV cameras from any TV in the house. There's my 12 year old UnRAID NAS in there that I now use as a backup file server, and a newer Diskstation NAS I use as a media server, a UPS to keep it all up for the 15 seconds or so it takes the generator to kick in.

Here's a comparison:

2018:


2024:

[Executioner]

Nice that you have everything labeled and with a diagram. My server is simply an older desktop with a couple of 4TB hard drives running windows 10. Not even sure how to set up a true home server. I would have to pay someone to do it.

[FlyingPenguin]

My file server (not in that photo, it's in my office closet) is just a Win10 Pro PC, with two 6TB spinners and a boot SSD. You don't really need a server OS, unless you have more than 10 simultaneous connections.

[Executioner]

My file server (not in that photo, it's in my office closet) is just a Win10 Pro PC, with two 6TB spinners and a boot SSD. You don't really need a server OS, unless you have more than 10 simultaneous connections.

But I want to keep up with Losbot

The problem that I mostly have is getting other devices to connect to it. I have the ip addresses, but I have some laptops that won't connect. Networking is NOT my favorite piece when it comes to PC's in general.

[FlyingPenguin]

Just a thought, maybe your problem with shares is related to this:

I ran into an issue when I upgraded my file server from WIn7 to Win10 last month. I couldn't access any of the shares on the server from my workstation, even though I had full access previously.

By trial and error I figured out that the issue was that, although the workstation user is an admin on the server, on my workstation that user is a limited user [for security reasons I run as a limited user on all my PCs). Win7 on the server didn't care as all it cared was that user "Bob" is an admin on the server, thus he has full access to everything.

But, apparently, Win10 OSes talk to each other and my workstation was telling the server that I was not an admin (on the workstation) and thus the server did not accept me as an admin on the server, even though that user was a member of administrators on the server (as it has always been).

I wound up having to find all the shares that "Bob" needed access to, and explicitly giving him full access to each one.