I’m a real estate developer in the US. I build apartment buildings all over the country. I’m in the process of completing one now in Bozeman, MT. It’s 52 apartment units with about 15,000sf of commercial space.
This is the first time I’ve personally taken on the task of designing and installing the network. I’m buying internet in bulk from a local distributor, and reselling to my tenants for a profit. The network gear is all Unifi and the firewall is pfsense in HA.
I wanted to thank @LTS_Tom for all the videos on youtube. I’ve pretty much watched every single one. And especially those related to unifi and pfsense. I designed, programmed, and installed the entire network with “support” from Tom’s videos. I’m a finance guy, with some “IT” experience. I mostly just tinker with stuff. It’s amazing what you can learn by simply watching videos on youtube. The effort for me was very high, and for the next project I’ll likely just hire Tom. It took me months to implement this project.
This network has 77 unifi devices between core switches, unit switches, and common area access points. I also setup (2) pfsense firewalls in HA. This system includes 32 CCTV cameras with a milestone NVR and Truenas archive server. I also setup (3) streaming Axis webcams for this project. You can see one here:
I installed a dedicated wowza server in a colo. This server has a Tesla T4 for transcoding. CPU is at about 60% with these 3 streams and transcoding offloaded to the T4. Internet is provided by Bozeman Fiber. I’m starting with a 500 Mbps symmetric link and can grow to 1000 Mbps as needed.
When I setup the firewall I had no idea how much time it would take to setup the 60+ vlans (in HA). I think it tripled the work. It probably would have been faster to do it directly in the xml file. Maybe next time. Each unit has a separate vlan and then I setup about 10 others for the public wifi, AV, access control, elevator, Iot. Finally, I setup a David Instruments weather station on the room. These are super cool with awesome data.
My contractor installed all the low voltage wire. I specified how to terminate everything into the patch panels in the MDF/IDF and unit media enclosures. I setup everything from the patch panels in. The contractor tried to rip my face off on the fiber backbone, so I did that myself too. I purchased ready to pull fiber that is preterminated. I saved 10K alone in the fiber backbone by doing that.
Here is the MDF: