When Something Gets Complicated - Go Simple

Well I spent a decent amount of time contemplating how I was going to mount the new 24-port switch into my network.  For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get this 17 inch box mounted in a space that was only about 12 inches wide.  Then I started looking at all of the wires that I was going to plug into the box and I discovered that most of them could be rerouted on the other side of the air duct.  On the other side of the air duct is where I have the FIOS Quantum gateway placed.  The gateway is placed on top of a wired rack so that I could put things like the HDHomeRun Prime and a USB NAS below it.

Since I am no longer using the Prime, it occurred to me that I could use the space to mount the 24-port switch.  I could reroute the Ethernet cables so that the connection point would move from in the tool room to just outside the tool room door.  This also works out well because I can now power the 24-port switch from a different outlet which is not being that utilized.  So I simplified the problem and it will only cost me an extra three Ethernet cables to connect the current setup.

I experimented over the weekend by moving the 24-port switch under the Quantum gateway and connecting the Ethernet cable from my internal router between the switch and the gateway instead of directly to the gateway.  In other words I setup a patch vlan: Ethernet wire from router to switch in one port connected to another port that had an Ethernet wire from switch to gateway.  This gives me an out in case I need to logically move the location of my router in my network.  I am starting to get the hang of this.