Network-a-Gogo
After running up and down two and half flights of stairs countless times I have now got the network in place and functioning. We are now sharing the internet connection through the whole house and no longer need a telephone extension cable to a modem under my desk. The place looks much better for it. Here's how the cable runs ended up.
In one run there's four cat5 cables and in the other there's two 6-core telephone cables and two coax TV cables. Getting them in there was an absolute nightmare, which involved taking the conduit apart and threading each section one-by-one. It also involved a lot of GT85 spray. There's no piece of magic string in there. There's no room for anything else and if any fail there's no way them will come out. They might as well all be simply plastered to the wall!
Not only am I thankful to you guys for all your advice, without which I would have struggled, but also to my brother. I'd mentioned to him what I was doing and so he popped round with a load of old dual rj45 faceplates from the local radio station, where he's the engineer. Saved me a small fortune!
As you can see from the photo, I've used four of these double faceplates to make two 4-port patch panels, one in the loft and one in the cellar. In the cellar shot you can also see the telephone socket that the modem/router/switch it's plugged in to. In to this is connected the WAP that you can see, which serves the rooms above it. The switch is also up-linked to the switch in my office via the conduit run and a 15m patch cable through the loft. Both floors are now connected via the two switches and all computers can share the internet and printer etc.
It's still not perfect. I still need to move the switch and servers from my office, connect some other rooms and tidy it all up, but at least it works. On a budget too. The total cost, including conduit and bits might stretch in to the hundreds, but it could have been a lot more expensive. All I did was cut some corners. Instead of using "professional" IDC punch-down tools I used the cheap plastic Krone tool you can see below. Networking can be an expensive hobby, but it doesn't need to be really.
The faceplate you can see is what I used as a test. Having never wired cat5 before I was unsure what to do. To make sure I got it right I rigged this up and then wired it between my PC and the switch to test the connections. Even though this worked without problem, only one of the four cables in the proper run is working so far...
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Wow. I'm impressed. We've been renting for a while now and will be looking to jump on the property ladder fairly soon. When we do, I will no doubt want to wire up the house so it's cool to see how you get on.
It'd be great to have the servers away in the basement, should be nice and cool down there, unlike the loft - but then you'll need to be 100% sure things aren't gonna get damp...
Interesting reading...(good luck),
J.
It's a great feeling Jono. I've always rented in the past and always looked forward to my own home, where I can have fun playing with networks and stuff. Even Karen seems to be coming round to the idea!
There are lots of lessons to be learnt and I'm sure I still made mistakes. If you want advice though, drop me a line.
One big lesson I learnt is that when they say "all telephones on the lines must be plugged in to micro-filters" they mean it. Took me days to work out why the modem was behaving oddly. It's all good fun though. As I've alwaya said - it would be boring if everything worked first time.
Jake as an point of interest you can get a master socket that allows you to dispose of microfilters, (have to admit I havent used these just read about them.
Details from www.clarity.it, aparently it is the same unit BT use for engineer installs of ADSL.
Thanks David. I'd love to get one of these but it looks like I can't. This diagram {Link} shows that *only* the master box is ADSL enabled. In this house the modem isn't plugged in to the master socket, which is in the hall-way. D'oh!
Jake,
Lookin good!!!
Yea, wiring is a slow pain staking process, that's why it is so expensive to hire it out. You did a nice job keeping it all neat and accessible.
It is a good idea to use one of the standard wiring schemes found here: {Link} . Otherwise you may get problems with long cable stretches due to interference. Learned that the hard way myself :-)