Home Network Cleanup

[mike123abc]

Finally decided that a giant tangle of cables under my desk had to go.

It started 11 years ago (when I moved to this house). I had 2 computers and ISDN. Later DSL moved in, and now cable modem. During that time the number of networked devices in the house grew like crazy. Now every settop box, TV, game console, and other assorted devices decided they wanted to be on the network too. I ended up with 18 wired and 2 wireless devices on the network.

All cables led to my office, it was getting ridiculous. So, last week I finally bit the bullet and re routed all the cables to the basement. Along with it, I started to home run the phone lines. I have the first floor done. I want to run more cables up to the second floor and put ethernet in every bedroom (master bedroom has 2 drops now with its own Gbe switch for the entertainment center). The house is over 80 years old, it was time for an upgrade. It still has some of the original phone lines (cloth covered copper).

Attached a couple pictures. I have 2 big UPSs. They give me about 2 hours of power.

The top switch panel is ethernet, the bottom one is phone.

I have about 4 more phone lines to home run and about 6 more ethernet cables.

The project for next weekend is a second NAS server. I plan on moving all my BDs and DVDs to it for playback anywhere in the house.

 

[diogen]

Love those pics, rack mount pr0n of sort...

DIogen.

 

[TheForce]

If that's the "After", what did the "Before" look like?

I thought you were going to show us no wires since you were moving into the 21st century wireless mode.

mike- I still have a main trunk of thinnet cable run through the house with coax to RJ-45 translators along the way. That dates me back to 1988 and the old Novell network. They run at 11 Mbs speed but are OK for printers.

Today, I'm adding wireless repeaters to augment my network. No more new cat5e runs. Next will be a gigabit link to the home theater room. Phone line is dead here but I do have a 6 ft line to my Dad's phone from Magic Jack.

 

[mike123abc]

I never had thinnet at home. I did go through the giant yellow snake with vampire taps, followed by thinnet at work. I hated thinnet, people would kick it under their desks and wipe out half the building.

Wireless just does not really cut it for me. When I play back blu rays they need a lot of bandwidth (peaking at 50mbit/sec). Too much for wireless.

 

[navychop]

I'm impressed. You got me beat.

Ah, that wonderful thin coax! I remember it well. I installed it in a town hall where I once worked. And later upgraded to RJ-45. I still prefer Novell, think they got a raw deal from MS. And, of course, what we used at a Marine base- Banyan Vines. Now THAT was wonderful!

 

[digiblur]

I miss the days of Token Ring... still had that system kicking around till around 2004 or so at one place I worked

 

[TheForce]

Thin net lacked the error correction and you'd get those data collisions causing loss of data but would not crash. eg. Print a page and some words on paper would be misspelled yet the file on screen was fine. I had a video render farm for network rendering 3D animation to a half dozen machines and I'd get these frames with distorted parts of an image. Like a persons nose appearing off his head sitting in space.

 

[Ramy]

I miss the days of Token Ring... still had that system kicking around till around 2004 or so at one place I worked

I hated Token Ring. "Who's got the Token?" LOL

 

[hancox]

I miss the days of Token Ring... still had that system kicking around till around 2004 or so at one place I worked

DIE DIE DIE.

 

[navychop]

I miss the days of Token Ring... still had that system kicking around till around 2004 or so at one place I worked

Wow. Bad memory resurfaced! I never worked with such, but had friends who did. Unhappy friends. And one who got "counseled" for declaring his desire to murder someone who liked to unplug cables.

At the end, didn't they come up with some multiple token scheme, something like managing to run two tokens at once?

 

[digiblur]

Wow. Bad memory resurfaced! I never worked with such, but had friends who did. Unhappy friends. And one who got "counseled" for declaring his desire to murder someone who liked to unplug cables.

At the end, didn't they come up with some multiple token scheme, something like managing to run two tokens at once?

I remember sitting in the server room...nothing but the sweet hum of the server fans that would make you doze off in your chair (guess its from the days of sleeping on all the crew boats years before)... I hear this click...then another click...and then I all I hear is click click click click click and it doesn't stop. CRAP!!! There goes the network. I open the wiring closet where all the MAU's were and start chopping the network down. I narrow it down to a segment across the building and what do I find? The goofball contractors doing office work cut a cable and decided to just twist the wires back together and put electric tape on it. and they didn't even match the colors up!!!

The day we switched over from 4 megabit token to 100 megabit ethernet was a beautiful day!

Sorry for hijacking the thread.... nice work on the pics!

 

[mike123abc]

I never got to use token ring. I worked at IBM and had the TR jacks on the wall, but we used ethernet.

 

[SatinKzo]

Laff, I'll take the antique Twinax network I worked on (on an old Series 300 AS400) over Token Ring any day.