Adventures in home networking, part 2

When we bought the house the inspector peeked into the attic through the small access hatch and came out telling us that we wouldn't want to store anything up there. I didn't think much about it then. After crawling up the hatch I come to realize that the one lightbulb high up is blown out and there is no flooring of any kind. I was also concerned about wasps as they have been hanging around the eaves all summer. After precariously replacing the bulb and peeking around for critters I needed to move a lot of stuff up there.



One project always leads to another and I was very tempted to put down plywood for an attic floor, but I was using up a lot of my free time already and would save it for another day. I had a lot of 2'x4' particle boards floating around from some shelving and they fit perfectly through the access hatch. I'd use these to crawl around on top of the attic joists. I set up my little path of boards to my destination and moved everything over.

I first drilled a small hole, this would accomodate the screws sticking out of the couplings, then I put in a large hole in for the tube itself.



I had brought the tubes up as-is hoping that all 10 feet would fit, but that wasn't to be. After swinging them around among the rafters I was resigned to cutting them down to 5' segments. I'd drop a segment, put a coupling on it, then put another tube on, after repeating this a few times the tube got pretty heavy, fortunately it bottomed out soon enough and the worst of it was over.

The screwdriver as a third hand, holding up the tube:


I had built a support for the top of the tube which would stabilize it and relieve some of the downward force. I installed the support and the final bend. I could have just had the cabling come straight out, but network cabling is to be treated with care if you want optimal speeds, the bend was cheap and a nice gentle curve.



Ready for some cables!

Adventures in home networking, part 1

When we last left off, my wife's Mac was in the cold basement not on the internet, and my PC is upstairs in a nice warm carpeted room. I'm starting to get the hint when every time I go to get on my machine, someone is sitting at it already. I have a wireless router and I could easily put an AirPort card into the G4 tower, but it just pains me to do that when the machine already has built-in GigE. I decide that I will move the cable modem and wired router into the basement, and run cabling up to my PC on the second floor. This will be one small step in reducing the mess in my "office" and will add a little value to the house.

Our house is wired such that all the cabling for the second floor is run up a cavity in an exterior wall and then dropped from the attic into the rooms. I could attempt to snake cables up, but is is very tight and full of 120V AC, I've been zapped before and really don't want to mess with this mess. After staring at a lot of walls and the unfinished basement ceiling I realized there was a return air "duct" that ran from the master bedroom to the basement. The heating guys were using the interior of a wall for a duct and had just cut a hole between the first and second floor. It was a straight shot from the attic to the basement, what luck! I got on the net and ordered 1000' feet of CAT6, a bunch of wall plates, jacks and some tools.

A plenum is "an air-filled space in a structure; especially : one that receives air from a blower for distribution (as in a ventilation system)". There are plenum and non-plenum rated network cabling. One gives off noxious deadly fumes when it burns and the other does not. So I had 1000' feet of non-plenum cable and I was about to run it through an air duct in the master bedroom. My visions of burning network cable in the basement killing us upstairs before we even had a chance were not sitting well with me.

The alternative to using plenum rated cabling is to put the cabling in a fireproof conduit. My choice, 1.5" Electrical Metallic Tubing (EMT) tubing, it's thick galvanized steel and is cheap. It will be big enough for all the CAT6 to the second floor and small enough to fit through the cavity easily.

I bought two 10 foot segments of tubing from Home Depot:



Two bends, one for the top, on for the bottom:



And some screw on couplings:



The ends of the tubes are pretty rough, I don't want the cabling sitting on fine metal burrs, so I polish the exits of the bends smooth before going into the attic.

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.

Sauron moved in, property values are going to drop now!