0028. UniFi for the IT network, and a rack you can read without hovering

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-09-29

Context

Feedback: comms room pages have a terrible experience; every hover over the rack “gets really bad”. Could it just show what each device is, as a drawn picture, and when you hover show it right there with what is in the rack? The old view drew the rack 320 px wide (about 21 px a unit), dimmed everything but the hovered item, and swapped the text of a side card whose height changed under the pointer.

Decided on 29 Sept: UniFi for the IT network (comms room switches, gateway, Wi-Fi, home offices). The in-room AV switch stays Netgear AV Line, because it is tested and set up for Dante and Q-SYS. Every rack in the data was Cisco and Palo Alto.

Decision

The rack view (src/components/RackView.astro, faces in src/lib/rackfaces.mjs): an overview and a detail. After a first redesign drew the 42U MDF rack about 1,700 px tall with a list beside it: make the rack much smaller, and show the chosen unit large beside it with everything about it.

• Left, the whole rack small and to scale, about 12 px a unit (a 42U rack is about 500 px tall), each item drawn from its product’s front with a bar in its group’s colour and free space dashed. Pointing shows the item’s name; click, tap or Enter chooses it; Up, Down, Home and End move through the items. The choice is kept in the address (#u19), so it can be linked. A screen reader gets the items as a list box, not the drawing.
• Right, the chosen item large: its front drawn the full width of the detail, every port on it. A port a recorded patch cable uses shows a plug in the cable’s standard colour (on UniFi switches, the Etherlighting ring too). Pointing at a port, or Left and Right, shows where its cable goes (cable, colour, purpose, the far end port by port where both ends are runs of the same length) with links to the cable list and the unit it reaches; a click keeps it. Under the drawing: the model and part number, hostname, health (the unit’s lifecycle and open incidents), ports in use and free, PoE as the vendor states it, uplinks, what it replaced and when, and Open the unit, About the model and Patching for this unit. The chosen item’s rows light in Patching, and the items at the other ends of its cables are outlined in the small rack.
• The first choice is an item that needs attention, else the top recorded device, else the top network item.
• Motion: the chosen slot grows into the large drawing (--dur-morph) and the words cross-fade (--dur-state) inside a frame that only grows (rsHold), so choosing never moves the page. Reduced motion switches at once.
• The UniFi fronts are traced from Ubiquiti’s labelled panel drawings; the others follow the front panel their rack-gear file describes from the vendor’s documents.
• A rack with a recorded replacement (replaced on a rack item: the product, the date and why) has a Now or Before switch; the changed fronts cross-fade in place and the detail says what stood there.

UniFi is the house standard for the IT network from 29 Sept 2026. Each model is read twice from Ubiquiti’s public tech specs pages (the spec table, and separately the labelled panel and dimension drawings on the same page), cited in data/sources/unifi.yaml:

• Access: UniFi Switch Pro Max 48 PoE (USW-Pro-Max-48-PoE): 48 RJ45 (32 Gigabit, 16 2.5 GbE; 32 PoE+, 16 PoE++), four 10G SFP+, 720 W PoE, 1U. The same count of copper ports and 10G uplinks as the floor needs, and more PoE per port for Wi-Fi 7 access points and PoE++ room kit.
• Core: UniFi Switch Pro Aggregation (USW-Pro-Aggregation): 28 10G SFP+ and four 25G SFP28, 1U, 325 mm deep. 10G down to every access switch and 25G up to the gateways. The newer Pro XG Aggregation (32 25G SFP28) is 480 mm deep and needs 600 mm posts; more than a mid-size office’s core needs.
• Gateway: UniFi Enterprise Firewall (EFG), a pair in Shadow Mode. Chosen over the Dream Machine Pro Max because it replaces a pair of Palo Alto firewalls like for like: SSL inspection and URL filtering, 12.5 Gbps IPS, 5,000+ clients, two hot-swappable power supplies (one on each feed), and 25G SFP28 to the core. The Dream Machine Pro Max (5 Gbps IPS, 2,000+ clients, one supply plus an optional RPS, NVR bays the comms room does not need) would suit a small office. The gateways run the UniFi Network application, so there is no separate wireless controller.
• Not UniFi, and why: the Panduit patch panels and cable managers, Corning fibre housings, the APC Smart-UPS and battery pack, the Raritan PX3 power strips, the ZPE out-of-band console server and cellular router, and the providers’ ADVA boxes. UniFi makes no patch panels, fibre housings or console servers; its UPS is not in the standard; and both UniFi PDUs (PDU Pro, PDU Hi-Density) take 100 to 125 V AC only (FCC and IC certified), so they cannot run Dublin, London or Singapore racks. The in-room AV switch stays Netgear AV Line M4250.

Migration, not a rewrite. The IDF and MDF room profiles get a unifi build option, first and marked since; the earlier Cisco build stays as an option with superseded_by: unifi, so every rack built to it stays recorded as older kit. The profile page shows how every comms room compares: whether its racks match (every switch, gateway and controller carries standard: unifi in its rack-gear file) and, if not, which older kit is in it and the year the refresh policy says it is due. One pilot rack, Dublin office IDF 4.21 (dub-4-21), was converted on 21 Sept 2026: both access switches replaced in the same units with the same patching, the Cisco units kept as the outgoing (legacy) units until they are collected, and the two console cables to them removed (the vendor’s drawings of the UniFi switches show no console port). The MDF profile shows a typical UniFi layout (data/rack-layouts/) until an MDF is built to it.

Consequences

• The whole rack fits on a screen, and the item you care about is drawn large enough to read every port. Nothing dims and nothing moves when you point or choose. The old labels list beside the rack, the dimming and the side card that changed height are gone.
• New checks in tools/crossrefs.mjs: a replaced product exists and is the same height; a rack stands in a space or is a typical layout of a real build option; a rack item at a recorded position shows the model the install records there; a rack product’s device_model exists.
• sfp28 is a connector (schema and SHAPES).
• Known gaps: Wi-Fi is not modelled in rooms today (no access point class or positions), so no UniFi access points were added; the floors work (0030) places them. The outgoing Cisco units of the pilot count as units of the UniFi model on its model page, because a unit has no model of its own (Keia Atlas’s positions assume a replacement keeps the model). The switch class is still named “In-room network switch”, and the gateway class “Home network gateway”, though comms rooms use both. The new models’ profile pages show the class outline: the traced drawings live in the rack view, not yet in src/lib/art.mjs.