Adventures in home networking, Introduction

Our house is only a few years old, but we bought it used and had no control over how it was wired. It's a nice house, but we're not in a high tech area and the wiring job is pretty basic. Electrical of course, a lot of cable tv plugs and a few phone jacks, when I mean a few I mean a few, there is ONE in the entire upstairs. I could watch TV anywhere, but if there was an emergency I'd have to run to the master bedroom. The irony of course is that we don't even own a TV.

After browsing around at my options, I decide to replace the existing cable TV plates with four hole keystone plates. The four jack plates have a nice balanced look to them and three RJ45's per plate seems like plenty but not excessive.

It will go from this:

To this:

You can use CAT6 and an RJ45 jack for both network and phone, so I decide to use that everywhere. Going with a structured wiring style, I will run a cable from each jack to the basement, no switches or daisy chaining. I'll just patch things how I want in the basement, allowing for maximum versatility.

After we moved in, I set up the cable modem, wired router, wireless router and my computers in a spare bedroom upstairs. My wife's Mac G4 tower is in the basement, not on the network, serving up music to speakers in the living room. The annoying thing already is that when I want to rip another CD onto her machine, I can't get the track name information from the internet. Must get all computers onto the internet.