Slashdot Mirror
Building A (Serious) Home Network From Scratch
Casey Lang-Vie writes "THG are running an article that outlines how to build a home network from scratch. I wish I'd read this before I attempted - now I have a few (ok, 8) unsightly holes in my wall." This is the type of network that encourages home ownership rather than rental.
What's the point of putting an article together if you just hire some guys to do it for you? Is choosing the cable type and faceplate style that big of a deal? That's like saying "I wrote this article about building a computer from scratch, and we just asked Dell to do it for us. Oh, btw, I asked them to use grey face plates instead of the black one."
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
In other words, it's planning for the future. Sure, you can get decent runs of gigabit ethernet over cat5e tp but what about ten gig? The day will come when you'll want to use it, and if you own the house, you may actually live to see that day :)
If it's a rental, you're just going to do a temporary install anyway. For example, I needed to run ethernet to a back bedroom, so I put holes in the ceiling in the bedroom and the living room (where the firewall, and the switch are) and just ran some cat5 up, through the attic, and back down. But if I actually lived here, I'd want to cut a hole in the wall, install a box, drop the cable down in the wall, and do a nice clean professional-looking install - And I'd want to plan for the future. In my case that would mean installing some smooth-sided conduit so I could poke some more cable through later, but if you end up having to rip out walls or something then I would definitely put in cat6 and seriously consider fiber. I'd also certainly install some coax and terminate it with BNCs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I made the mistake of reading this entire article. I recommend to all those who entertain the idea skip it. Important questions such as cat6 vs. 5e vs wireless a/b/g aren't given sufficient coverage. Instead it reads like an advertisement for some lame-o contractor. Few people build a home network like this. The guy tells you how to hire a contractor to do the hole punching for you! This isnt the slashdot way: we like punching our own holes in the walls and crawling around in attics and toiling in insulation. Sorry THG, usually your articles have at least marginal worth, this one was a real loser. From someone who has installed their own (highly pleasing, if you know what i mean) home network, dont read this article. Cover your eyes. If you want the advice this article gives you, I can summarize in one sentence. Hire a contractor. On the other hand, if you read slashdot, go to fry's, buy 1000m of cat5/e and a few face plates, get out the hammer and the pocket knife and start doing it big...
The choice to implement security AFTER there is a problem is a very poor choice IMO.
Bad call, for two reasons. First, security is not just to protect your stuff worth protecting. Your network itself is a valuable resource to hackers. Second, you can't always just "fix whatever they broke", because you don't know what they left behind. That's why even "white hat" hackers are bad when they go breaking into other people's computers -- they really may not have done anything but added a text file saying "You have been hax0red, here's how and what to fix", but you don't know that's all they did.
This lax attitude towards security is why there are so many DDoS networks out there built from the computers of ignorant cable and DSL users.
But as it is, people want me to spend more time trying to protect my computers then I would spend just doing an OS reinstall...that it probably needed anyway. No sir, not worth it.
It took me all of 2 minutes to enable WEP, enable MAC filtering, and turn off SSID broadcasts.
The way I figure it, you can spend two hours protecting your system, or you can spend two hours times N reinstalling. I'd rather take two hours up front, and have to reinstall less often because of security breaches.
Bad idea! If someone hacks your network and used your connection, then you could get into serous trouble
About a month ago, My next door neighbour was convicted of downloading child porn from the internet. When people in my neighbourhood read about it in the newspapers, they broke all his windows, wrote graffiti, and hounded him away.
Had I been running a wireless network, he could have easily leeched my internet connection to download the filth. Then the cops would have come knocking on my door. Even if I had been able to convince them that it was someone else, there would still be a nasty air of suspicion, from my other neighbours. Mud sticks.
After that incident, I would advise anyone thinking of setting up a wireless network to secure it well, and if they grant access to any third party, they should log EVERYTHING, as they may need those logs to defend themselves.
Likewise, an open network could be used to send spam, or hack attacks, but that is less likely to cause criminal charges back in the real world.