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The Myriad Ways of Wiring Your Home?
Wired, or Wireless? RickMuller asks: "I have a cable modem feeding into an ethernet hub in my house, of off which I string anywhere from 2-5 different computers. Currently these are all clustered near the cable modem itself. I would like to be able to spread the computers through my house, and particularly to be able to bring my laptop to other parts of the house and still be able to work online. I'm considering either hiring an electrician to wire the walls, or finding some wireless format. Wireless is definitely cooler, but I'm a little bit scared off by the 'tower of babel' of different formats. Plus the expense is a consideration. Can anyone else offer an opinion on wireless vs. wired at home, and if wireless, which wireless format?"
Sticking with the open solution is always the best, so I would go with an IEEE 802.11 based network for the wireless segment. Are there any wireless cards that do not grok 802.11? If so, then I'd stay well away from these unless the cost savings are really huge, which I doubt.
Building the Home of the 21st Century! Cactii submits: "My wife and I are thinkng about buying a home soon. We both have our own ideas about what the place is going to be like and the immediate improvements we will make to the existing structure of the house. My ideas involve electronic interfaces to different areas of the house. Wiring the house for a network and using the computer for almost everything that it can be used for.
First off - I'm going to wire the living room or family room into a total entertainment center. It'll have the usual stereo, TV, DVD, VCR, etc... However there'll also be a computer connected to a proxy server that allows instant internet access. The computer will allow us to surf the net and download MP3's to be played right off the computer hard drive through the stereo and other things as well.
I've been looking around for other 'Wired Home' solutions and all I've found were some programs and electronic gizmos that offer only a piece of the solution. X10.com is about as close to a solution as anything but I don't want all these little boxes hanging off of the wall plugs.
Has anybody found anything more integral? More of a total solution?"
Wiring A Home With an Eye on the Future? Oroborus asks: "My parents are building a new house from ground up, and want to try to be as 'forward compatible' as possible. They've asked for my help in incorporating as much technology as possible, and in preparing it for any future technology that we can forsee. The problem is that though they're excited by technology, they're not all that conversant with it, and anything they include will have to be extremely user friendly. My initial thought is to wire the house with shielded ethernet cable with all the drops in the basement, to be wired to a hub/router later. But they've got high hopes for a 'smart home', how else can they prepare for the future?"
A tough job, but maybe with a bit of thought, such things can be prepared for. How would you wire a home with an eye on making it so that future capabilities can be added in without painful construction bills?
Wiring Hostile Home Environments? Old Man Kensey issues the following query: "I've been annoying my roommate by populating every possible room in our apartment with a terminal of some kind (X over the Ethernet, null-modem PPP, or serial). There are two rooms I have not yet found suitable equipment for, though -- the kitchen and the bathroom. The bathroom has the obvious hazards, besides being pretty small, but the kitchen is even more hostile an environment. Besides water, you have various kinds of food and food-related goo, microwave radiation, heat, high humidity, and general cramped space.
Has anybody out there found cheap, readily-available equipment (serial terminals, etc.) that will withstand the worst hazards of a typical American home? How about cheap modifications like enclosures that fit in small spaces and might protect, say, a PowerBook-Duo-size laptop? I'm willing to deal with having to power up and down, but I'd like to have something that doesn't compromise the actual operation of the equipment (enclosures that block cooling fan vents, for example)."
You Can Wire in More Than a LAN, You Know... Cosimo Leipold asks: "I've recently purchased a house that is still under construction. The developer asked me what I wanted wired. Has anyone expiremented with what you can wire in a home sucesfully? The developer has no 'computer experience' of course, so beyond RJ-45 he didn't know what was feasible. He tells me that the cost of wiring is pretty minimal since the house has little more than the frame up at this point. I'm looking to the slashdot community for cool ideas as to what I can wire. (RJ-45, sound, s-video, intercom, etc). I'm thinking this might be a great chance to get X10 in. Ideas?"
It seems that a lot of people have discovered X10 for home automation, but is that the only game in town? Sure, it might be the most affordable, but for those people with larger pocket books, are there other alternatives that might offer more features for a larger pricetag?
...and Along the Same Vein, Why Not Wire for Sound? Last, but most certainly not least, wiremonkey puts this question on the table: "I hear a lot of talk about wiring homes, but very few people are thinking about anything except network/telephone wiring. I'm interested in how fellow geeks have wired their houses for audio. Right now, I have a system built around a Samson 24 channel mixer and two amplifiers. My audio sources include computers, CD players, ham radios, a tape deck, DVD, VCR, and TV. The current system lets me listen to different things in two 'zones' - the computer room vs. the rest of the house (I like my computers to beep in the computer room, but not the bedroom - yet I like my CD player to play music in both rooms). Note that I always have one compter's audio playing throughout the house, as it announces my telephone calls.
I'm looking at ways of distributing the control of the audio 'mix' to two locations (right now, you have to be at the main mixer to adjust something). I would locate the video equipment and an additional CD player in the living room, while I would locate the computer equipment and auxilary audio gear (tape deck, ham radio, another CD player) in the computer room. I'd like to be able to hear any audio source from any room. I'm a serious listener, and I hate 60hz hum (the current unbalanced audio lines I use cause nothing but problems with hum)! In addition, I live in a high RF environment, with HF, VHF, and UHF transmitters and 100 watts of power per band. I get sick of hearing my automated packet station while listening to Bach! At the same time, I would prefer not to run 20+ balanced lines between the two locations. What have you done in your house? What were the 'professional touches' that you added? What did you wish you did differently?
(Yes, I know there are turn-key systems that do this - however, I don't feel like spending $2000+ for a system which won't let me listen to my computer and CDs at the same time!)"
I've got some experience with setting up a wireless home network, and here are some of the things that I discovered. First of all, my general setup: I've got a ZyXEL Prestige 642 DSL router that I wanted to share between several machines, most notably a Dell laptop that I wanted to network wirelessly. The first thing that I did was buy a 5-port Linksys 10/100-BaseT autosensing Ethernet hub; I had been running the DSL router straight into my main desktop PC's NIC with a crossover cable. Now there's a hub, so the ground work is done.
.. the access point needs to be plugged into either a 10BaseT or an autosensing 10/100BaseT hub! It will not work with a 100BaseT-only hub!
.. anything above that is frosting on the cake. 802.11b offers a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 11Mbps, but in practice you'll probably get half that, even if you're in the immediate vicinity of the access point. If all you're looking to do is be able to sit out in your backyard and read Slashdot, that's probably more than sufficient. If you need 100Mbps+ speeds to your local machines, you need to drill some holes and run some cable. Personally, I think the wireless cards are just plain fun. I can read Slashdot from the neighbor's yard, for Christ's sake. :-)
The first thing you'll need is (obviously) a wireless access point. For this, I would recommend the Linksys WAP 11 wireless NAP. This is an inexpensive (~$240) piece of equipment that has worked flawlessly for me thus far. There are more expensive and more capable access points, but IMHO you can't go wrong with this one, at least for a home setup. Note that this access point is a straight pass-through; it does not do DHCP or anything like that. For me, this isn't an issue because my DSL router acts as a DHCP server.
Some more notes about the WAP11: it comes "out of the box" configured with an IP address of 192.168.1.250. Again, this was fine for me since my home network is 192.168.*.* based. Obviously, this can be changed, but the provided configuration software is Windows-only. You can configure the unit either by plugging in the provided USB cable and running the USB-based configuration program, or you can do it via a SNMP-based configuration client. Oh, and before I forget
Okay, so now you've got an access point plugged into your network hub. The next thing you need is a wireless card. If you're networking a laptop, grab a Lucent ORiNOCO 802.11 Silver PC card. Linksys makes its own wireless PC card, and if you're buying the Linksys access point, you may be tempted to buy the same brand for the PC card. Don't. Linksys's card works fine, but its range is limited; it is far less than what they advertise. The radio that the Lucent cards use is far, far better. Many people have reported tripling their ranges when switching from the Linksys to the Lucent card.
I've had no problems with the Lucent card. Hell, they even include the source code for Linux drivers on the installation CD! The Linux driver you're looking for is "wavelan2_cs", and it supports 64-bit WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) (40-bit, actually) encryption. For the sake of full disclosure, however, it should be pointed out that WEP's security is under fire (expanded PDF version)
In general, if you're looking for raw speed, you're not going to get it with 802.11b (or, at least, you aren't going to get wired speeds.) For me, I mainly use my network to surf the Internet, and my DSL downstream bandwidth maxes out at 1 Mbps or so
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
First some background, my home is totally wired. We have some 30 ethernet drops spread throughout the house, all terminating in a central wiring/server closet. Based on this experience, I have a few peices of advice to offer.
:)
1) Always do it right.
By this, I mean don't do anything half-assed just because it's a home installation. This is a mistake I see a lot of people making. Network cable is rather fragile (if you want to maintain 100BaseT capability). This means that running it over the floor, through heating ducts, and what not is generally not a good idea. Plus, running the cable that way is just ugly, and a potential danger. And besides, drywall is easy to patch.
Also, it's incredibly important to document which cable is which. There is nothing more frustrating then trying to figure out which jack/end in one room matches up with which cable down in another room. The easiest way to do this is to come up with a numbering convention for your home, and then mark these numbers on both ends of the cable with some sort of label (Masking tape/pen works fine).
All the cable in our network terminates is laid to cat-5 specifications, and terminates in a proper wall plate on one end, and a patch pannel (see Ours) on the other. This has saved us hours of trying to track down problems, and allows us to quickly bypass problems should one occur. If I were to do our network again, the only change I would make would be to use a 50 pair horizontal cross connect cable to go from our second floor to the wiring closet.
2) Don't underestimate how much cable you need.
The other mistake I see people making is that they underestimate how much cable they need to run to their bedroom, or any other room. Invariably, this leads to chaining hubs, and all sorts of other problems. It's best to pull lots of cable, and if you don't need it right now, just leave it in the walls for future use.
In our place, we pulled 4 lines to each of the bedrooms, and that's barely enough. As it stands, the three of us that live in our home are all using all four drops in each bedroom.
3) Always pull a string.
Whenever you pull cable through floors/ceilings/walls always pull a string along with the cable, and do your best to keep it from getting tangled or twisted around the cable. This string can then be used, in turn, to pull the next cable. When you're done, leave a string in place, in case you suddenly realise you need a nother cable. Your cheap Polyester twine that can be had from Home Depot will be more then adequate.
4) Don't go totally overboard.
Don't spend too much on stuff that you don't need. Cat-5e isn't really worth it, since gigabit can go over properly laid Cat-5, don't lay fiber unless you intend to actually use it, don't buy plenum cable unless your fire code requires it, ect.. Really, always just keep an eye out for the best price/reliability values out there.
This is more important for things like jacks and connectors then for hubs/switches. With a good quality jack, the wires will not come loose. We've been bitten by this more then a few times, and have had to punch things down more often then we'd like.
Hubs and switches, in general, are pretty reliable no matter who makes them. For home use, there really isn't much point in purchasing the latest and greatest 3Com switch, when something less expensive will do the trick. It's highly unlikely that you will need to use all the bells and whistles an expensive one would provide you with.
5) Think Safety.
When opening up walls to pull cable and/or drilling exploratory holes, always be weary of hitting electrical cabling. 120V is not something that you want to hit with a hand saw. Also, be careful if you're up on a ladder. It's very easy to come un-ballanced while doing a hard pull.
6) Add Toys.
The last thing to do, once you have a stable platform to work on is to add toys. 802.11 is fun, and incredibly cool, but still much more expensive then a wired solution (as long as you're handy, and can do a reasonable job yourself).
Anyway, I hope this information helps people out with their plans. If there is enough interest, I can put together a list of materials that we used, to give an idea of what works. (Most of our equipment comes from Lin Haw).
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
-p.
I think the best thing is to have everything run in conduits. That way, you can easily add new wires / remove old ones.
...)
:), maybe even wires for cameras so you can see the pizza guy at your door from your TV :)
The problem with running everything in conduit is the price (much more $$$), and you have to do it while the house is being built (unless you want to tear down walls..)
I think the 2nd best thing to do is run 2 or 3 Cat5 (or better, cat 6?) wires everywhere, even for the phone jacks. That way you have spares incase you want to add a network jack somewhere.
Some people might think about fiber also. I'm not sure as to the costs/benefits. I think fiber is a pain to run (it can't be bent to much, can't be pulled to hard,
Also, don't forget the coax for cable TV, and speaker wires for the cool surround sound system
Conduit. Lots and lots of big, easy to access conduit. There is no better way to prepare for future cabling needs.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I started out with a BAN (Basement Area Network)
This worked for all the 1st floor rooms, but I scratched my head for a long time about how to extend my network to the kids' bedrooms upstairs. I discovered a TV antenna mounted in the attic, with the coax going down to the basement through a conduit.
I tied a string, pulled the cable through, then pulled a length of cat5. I bought another hub and wired the length going to the attic as a cross-over to connect the two hubs. Then I ran cat5 to each room, dropping through small holes drilled in the closets. Again I used surface-mount boxes, installed this time on the inside of each closet near the door. Both the kids' computers are sitting along the walls near the closets, so the patch cable is slipped under the door.
For my server room, I bought some of that wire shelving from Office depot and put it in the small study off in the back of the house to prop up my web server and file server. I got one of those cheapo data transfer switches so I could hook up the monitor and kbd.
I got a cheap rolling cart and set up a print server in the kitchen closet. My company waits about 5 years before they throw out old computers, I happened to be there when they were throwing an old compaq laptop and its docking station out. The display was fried, but the docking station has 2 ISA slots, it was pretty easy to get a $10 ne2000 card to work in there and to get samba running so kids could print from their win boxes.
Problem is, I keep coming up with ideas for stuff I want to do and it usually involves getting an old PC from someone, installing Linux or BSD and running some wires somewhere. A few weeks ago I got really pissed because my ISP's DNS servers were down for the 3rd time that week. A woman I work with had given me an old Packard Bell 486 sh*tbox with a <100 Mb drive, I decided to set it up as a name server.
I have a real problem. Looking around the room here, I have 7 boxes (actually, only 4 of them are on and doing anything right now). Well, guy's gotta have a hobby, right?
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There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
When my family moved into the home we currently live in, there were all of TWO phone jacks on one phone line over three floors and almost 2000 sq feet. Not good. For the first couple of weeks you couldn't walk around without tripping over some phone extension coming up from the basement ;-)
Because this house is in an area where break-ins are not uncommon, we decided to get a security system put in. In general, you'll find that the guys (or gals!) who install such systems tend to be highly knowledgeable about exactly how to bring wires from the attic to the basement without ripping the wall open to do it. For a very reasonable surcharge, they were able to wire each room in our home with cat5 professionally and quickly. It would have taken us days to do the same thing. (Of course we still had to crimp the cable and wire the outlets.) So if you want to get cat5 AND a security system installed, you might want to use this method to kill two birds with one stone. And because standard cat5 has FOUR pairs in it, one cable can support TWO LANs (at two pairs each) or one LAN and two phone lines. (Each phone takes 1 pair.)
Get your electrician to lay the cable if you want it neat and haven't got the time (or skill).
Choose decent cable UTP Cat 5 or higher is fine.
Best avoid laying cables in parallel to power.
Use switches not hubs whenever possible - they are cheap these days
Set aside some space to serve as a central place for your server(s)
You can mix media, so Wireless extensions to a wired network might make sense in your building (especially if you'd like to share with the neighbours)
Find your local nerd to help secure your computer if you plan to share an internet connection (especially if it's broadband!)
Keep at least one network game (remember the locations of valuable items on the maps) and a few bottles of coke handy just in case friends drop by
there is probably countless other tips =) ..
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Jon - TheSpork