Theater Audio Network Phone Gadgets Home

Overview

When we remodeled our house in 1998 I took the opportunity to do home run wiring for a home network and for the phone system. In this floorplan of our house, everywhere you see a red "E" there is at least one ethernet jack. There is also a phone jack in those locations. Each location has two cat 5 cables going to it. At the moment, the ethernet jacks are wired with 4 conductors each enabling 10Mbit operation. There are spare conductors at each location giving me the option to wire the jacks for 100Mbit operation if desired. I did it this way for flexibility. In a given location I can have two 10Mbit jacks or one 100Mbit jack. Since the original installation I've upgraded to 100Mbit operation. Of course this doesn't speed up internet access, but it does improve the speed between computers in the house.

All of the cat 5 cables lead back to a closet in the room I use as an office (see image below). They enter a three gang electrical box and are wired into jacks. Here's a closer look at the ethernet distribution area. I originally planned to wire them into a punchdown block, but this option took a little less space and met my needs. Patch cables connect these jacks to a 16 port hub.

The hub is connected to a Linksys BEFSR41 Router which provides DHCP and NAT. It's also a 4 port 100Mbit switch. The router connects directly to the DSL modem. Pacific Bell provides the DSL service which works reasonably well. Hardware reliability is good, but they occassionaly have routing problems that make parts of the internet unreachable for (usually) short periods of time.

Component List

My system consists of the following:

Manufacturer	Component (w/image)	Description
Apple	Airport Base Station	Base station for wireless data. See below for details.
Alcatel	1000 ADSL	DSL modem supplied by Pac Bell.
Linksys	Linksys BEFSR41 Router	Router with DHCP and NAT support. Works like a charm even allows VPN passthrough. Also contains a 4 port 10/100 switch.
Quantum	Snap! Server 1000	15 Gig of network attached storage.
Netgear	DS116 16 port hub	No frills 10/100 16 port hub.
Lucent	WaveLan Silver Card	Wireless PCMCIA card. Used in my PC laptop.
Apple	Airport Card	Used in my wife's iBook.
Hawking	Small 100Mb switch	Used in my office to hang multiple PC's off a single drop.

System Evolution

August 2002

• I finally got around to upgrading to 100Mbit operation. There was really no pressing need to do this, but after transfering several gig of data between machines I decided a little extra speed couldn't hurt. I upgraded my primary hub to a 100Mbit version. Several key machines are routed through the switch in the router rather than the hub. Also, in my office I have several computers hanging off another small 100Mbit switch connected to the first.

I cut some corners in this process. In two locations in the house I divided a single Cat5 cable into 2 sets of 2 pairs so that I could get 2 10Mbit circuits on a single cable. This is technically a no-no for 100Mbit, but I decided to try it and see if it worked and how well. I got lucky. Both sites worked quite well so I didn't bother "fixing" them.

September 2000

• I added a Quantum Snap! Server 1000 to my configuration. It's a little 5"W x 3"H x 9"D box that is basically a little file server. The correct term is "Network Attached Storage". You just plug in the power and ethernet and it comes up as a file server that is simultaneously visible as a Novell server, Microsoft Networking server, AppleShare server, NFS server, and web server. It's really simple to set up and so far it just works.

I believe the box runs FreeBSD internally and is said to be very stable. The small internal fan runs only when needed, but when it does it seems awefully loud to me. I hope I don't have a bad one. At some point I will probably crack it open, void my warranty, and add a bigger disk. Until I run out of space I'm going to leave it alone.

Going Wireless

Networked Printing

At the moment we have 5 computers in the house - the two laptops mentioned above, my wife's iMac, and my two Wintel desktop machines. The desktop machines are hardwired to the net. We have three printers. They are all accessible via HP print servers. One multiport print server is in my office and connects two of the printers. The other is in Mary's office and connects the other. Both print servers support Mac's and PC's so all the printers are available to all the computers.

Originally we had a Mac-specific print server (a Farralon ethernet to appletalk bridge) connected to the computer in Mary's office. I used PC Maclan from Miramar Systems to give the windows machines AppleTalk capabilities. Since I replaced the Farralon device with the HP print server I no longer need that software.

One of the printers isThe workhorse is an HP laserjet. It's connected to the net via a Farralon ethernet to appletalk bridge. The iMac and iBook get to it using their built-in ethertalk support. I get to it from the wintel world using the built-in AppleTalk support in Win2K. I used to use PC Maclan from Miramar Systems an HP 970C color inkjet printer. It's getting harder to find HP inkjets that work with both Mac's and PC's. This one does and we've been pretty happy with it.

Learned the hard way...

• I tried a really cute wireless PCMCIA card from 3Com. The antenna retracts so that when you're moving around your laptop you don't have an antenna hanging out that can be accidentally broken off. For the longest time I couldn't get the card to work properly with WinXP. A new set of drivers arrived that improved the situation pretty dramatically, but the range was quite limited compared to my Lucent card. I've gone back to it.
• I've been fooling around with a webcam trying to set up something that will allow us to look in on the birds in our back yard. In the process I bought an XCam 2 from X10. It's a little wireless camera that transmits to a base station that has video out. The goal was to position this camera in a prime spot and get the signal to the computer without having to run a video cable. The camera worked, but the airport stopped working. They both are 2.4 Gig devices and they seem to interefere with one another. I gave up on the camera and am looking into other solutions.
• The Snap! 1000 server works like a charm, but you can not field upgrade the disk. After mine started making loud disk noise I thought I'd try and replace the disk with a new one. I put in a new, larger disk and hoped I could get the unit to format it and come up. It did not. I tried copying the old disk onto the new one using Norton Ghost. The unit came up and seemed to be checking the file system (according to the flashing lights) but never completed. I put the old disk back in and I try to ignore the noise. I've scoured the net looking for someone who has made this work, but have had no luck. If you know how to do this, let me know. Update: There is a posting on usenet from someone who successfully upgraded one of these boxes. Search Google groups to find it. It turns out there is a hidden web page on the Snap that provides aditional disk formatting functions.
• I came home from a business trip to find that I no longer had wireless access. I checked the Apple Airport and the LED's were displaying an alternating sequence of a single red light and three amber lights. After doing some investigation I learned that this typically means that a couple of capacitors in the power supply are fried. Fortunately for me a number of people have already been through this with Apple and they are replacing certain units (based on serial number) even if they are out of warranty. Check out this page for details and information on repairing it yourself.