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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.
Worked for me.
Building A (Serious) Home Network From Scratch
Because lets face it, if you're not building a serious home network, then what are you building?
Wall plates, contractors, planning -- feh. Do it the easy way: buy a $2.99 package of ethernet cable wall staples at Home Depot. Grab a hammer, and you can have cables routed all over your house within minutes.
have 6 or 7 holes in every wall with in the house with blue wires hanging out of them.
Wall plates? "We don need no steenkin wallplates!"
Really now, why would anyone plan out a home network? That takes all the fun out ot it!
I mean what's more fun than pulling wires at the last minute when you really have to have that wire.
And then trying to untangle the whole thing when you have to trouble shoot it!
Real men have huge tangled and matted nests of wires and they KNOW what every wire is!
As is detailed here and here, Toms Hardware recently performed a media blackout at a Public event, the Million Man Lan Party.
They are currently threatening to sue an online journalist (who happens to be a poor college student) for libel regarding his reporting of this story. Fortunately, the friendly folks at Hardocp have stepped in to provide some legal assistance for the guy, to make sure he is not railroaded into pulling down his editorial describing THG's media shenanigans.
Do your part for Internet Free Speech. Boycott Toms Hardware Guide.
Just a thought...
Remember to follow spec when making your own network cables. Running the wires straight through will cause issues (signal interference). You must have pins 3 and 6 on the same twisted pair, otherwise, the cables won't work after 30 feet or so...
If I had done it correctly, I could have saved 2 trips to the store, and lots of headaches.
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.'"
It is trivial to sniff your non-encrypted packets and determine the subnet you are using (or at least the IP address of your machines and gateway).
Why not use WEP? It doesn't cost anything. Also turn on MAC filtering and turn off SSID broadcasts.
Then you can claim to have a reasonably secure environment. (As far as consumer wireless stuff goes.)
In my first flat me and my flatmates (roommates) networked our house. All we had on hand was a knife sharpener and a Mallet. So, knife sharpener was placed against the wall, and given a nice thumb with the mallet. The entry wounds (my name for them) were quite nice and neat, only about 3 cm diameter of disturbed wall. However, the exit wounds on some walls had cracks up to about 1 metre long and actual openings of about 10 cm in diameter.
:)
However, a few well placed posters and a lenient landlord helped
All in all, it was a nice reliable, albeit co-ax, network.
Nowadays I have a nice neat network, using lots of cable ties, packing tape and lots of Cat5. I am currently doing free computer work for a sparky friend in the hope that I can get some Cat5 installed for free when I buy my own home.
I just called up Dell and told them what to put in my box. I told them to put in P4 3Ghz, instead of 2.8GHz because it's better, and only slightly more expensive. I also told them what color cables to use. Moderators: It's funny, because it's True
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
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...
Another idea for a home network is to run special cable rather than separate phone, ethernet, and coaxial.
It is bundled Cat5, telephone, and coaxial, and comes in a tight package not much larger than heavily shielded (RJ-6 coax?).
You can easily run central distribution of phones, video on demand, networking...etc...
Kill 3 birds with one stone....
Plenum cable is pretty much the same as regular CAT, except it's more expensive and more fire resistant.
Regular CAT in a fire can act like a fuse, moving the fire from one part of the house to another inside the walls.
Right off the bat, I see one very evil problem with the article- they show cables with those $@#!ing boots.
I'm gonna make this as clear as possible:
NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER BUY ETHERNET CABLES WITH BOOTS.
Why? Because you can't plug them into switches/hubs/routers unless the device has spacing to allow for the boot. Many, many devices don't! The boots also do a great job of interfering with the case of many systems with builtin ethernet.
Oh, and here's another tip for the readers, a VERY common myth- I didn't see if they mentioned this, but you CANNOT just do "same color order on both ends". The whole point behind twisted pair is that the twisted pairs reduce loss from magnetics. In order to take advantage of that, you have to use the pairs properly- ie, you need to put the pairs on the rx and tx pairs on the connector, or you've got a signal flowing over different pairs, and that's WRONG. I had to correct several coworkers at two different jobs, who were wiring cables any old way, just making the ends the same. Surprise, the cables worked like shit. Folks- 100BaseT spec only allows for ONE INCH of untwisted wire on the entire cable, so don't go making really long untwisted leaders into the connectors. It's a pain to get the hang of it and getting 'em all lined up right, but it needs to be done properly!
Please help metamoderate.
You are right...and as soon as I think one of my neighbors can/will do that, I'll upgrade my wireless network security.
I regularly run net stumbler and the like to see if I can pick up other wireless networks. When I think I actually need better security I'll add it. For the time being though, there is nothing on any of my computers that really needs securing.
As for why I don't use WEP? I've found it somewhat buggy and it sucks up bandwidth.
The choice to implement security AFTER there is a problem is a very poor choice IMO.
I used to think the process described in the article was the way to build a home network, and that's why I didn't have a home network. Like a big LEGO sculpture, it's cool to look at, and some geeks will make a hobby of it, but it's not a project for most people who just want a useful end-product.
Now there's WiFi, and even the cheap 802.11b hardware is fine for sharing files, printers, and broadband. Buy a USB adapter for each remote computer and you don't even need to open the cases. You can have everyone connected in an hour. Now THAT is practical home networking.
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.
Your home has phone lines, right?
Go onto EBay and get some nice US Robotics Courrier HST modems, one for each room. Next, find some speedy 486DX-50 (not DX2-50) boxen, also one per room.
As you add more and more 486 and HST modems, both your compute speed and comm throughput tends towards infinte.
This is the beauty of the Home Beowulf Network!
Ethernet is for wussies. Real Men (tm) do it at 16.8k.
Because I was upgrading from a true 10 mbit network (10B2.. people kept #@!#ing with the T-connectors) and wasn't about to take a performance hit, as well as a large monetary hit.
/port of pci wireless card: $50-70. Call it $60.
Shared files on 10 mbit were fairly slow, and print jobs for the new printer were taking minutes per page to spool on complex pages.
10/100 card, $8/port.
16 port switch, $90. 7 ports used, $13/port.
Wall plate / jack, $8/port.
Cable: Had leftover partial spool of 5e, free.
price per port for switched 100 mbit? $29
7 port wireless:
Price
Access point, varies, $80 for an okay one. $11/port.
Price per port: $71 / port for shared 11 mbit that goes down anything someone turns on the microwave.
G wasn't widely available when I put the 10/100 in, but current prices seem to be:
Did I include time to run the wire and terminate it? No.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
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.
I skimmed over the article and kinda looked bewildered when I saw that rack monster. From the look of this it kinda take the 'new' this old house stance instead of the 'old' this old house stance. That is to say, looks like they are doing new construction as opposed to a geeky retrofit.
Knowing your house plan is important as well as plan plan planning.
With DSL you have a bit of room to play. If possible (and environment permitting) I like to tap the phone line right where it comes into the house (usually the basement). Setting a nice shelf on the wall for your modem and (mandatory) router. A small 12" patch panel (larger if you want to do a phone retrofit). With Cable you are sometimes more tied to where the cable comes in, and thats not always the basement.
But planning is the key. Find where you want to be the heart of the network and try to run stuff there. If possible split the incoming broadband only once before the downlink device (modem).
Now comes the big question mark that hangs over most people's heads.. how to I do the jacks? Most people are just plain not familiar with the products in this category. There are several manufactures of this stuff I have experience, and happen to like the Panduit mini-com line of products. Most of the vendors have similar competing products. These jacks are not cheap. Try not to skimp and use low quality product. These are modular jacks that snap into not only the patch panel but also wall units that mount into standard electrical boxes (use the blue plastic ones please.. don't slice your data lines). The jacks are color coded and then snap together. You (almost) cant mess it up.
Now nearly all of your do-it-yourself people will not have a proper TDR (time domain reflectometer) to do exhaustive testing with. If you buy one of those 15 buck line continuity tester and if you use the (nearly) mistake proof jacks, you will probably be just fine for your updated geek home of tomorrow.
PS. Just because I like to my self I recommend that you run 2 lines if you are going to run one. The cable is cheap and you are already committed to the effort of running it.
PPS I'll leave the cable choice discussions up to other threads and the article. But if possible, match your jacks to the type of cable you choose.
I've also done thin-net installations, I can answer a few questions there if someone is a masochist:)
(next)
This is my
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story about how
(next)
I thought I was a
(next)
Real Man for hiring
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a contractor to do my
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manly work. Call me 404.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Here's Mr Green, he's so serene, he's got a TV in every room
Oh, and yes, non-plenum cable can indeed carry fire from one part of a building to another.
Well I have a nice home network that consists of copper strung through the walls. And if you want a professional looking job here are some tips and tricks to use:
- first place to check is your basement. Older homes might have had duct work for forced air heating but since switched to steam/hot water. I have helped my friend wire his whole house using the old ducts as pathways for running the cable.
- IF you want to run cable through the walls the outer walls of your home are filled with insulation thus making it near impossible to pull cable. the next best walls are walls inside your home that both side of the walls are inside your home. they are hollow and can easily have cable pulled through them.
- Closets are your friend as you can drill holes in them without having to worry about people seeing them. I have a cable that runs from my basement to the second floor closet through a hollow inner wall and then through the closet floor into the ceiling into the attic where I pulled the wire along to another room and drilled down through its closet to run the cable.
- If you want to know where studs are inside the walls of your home the standard spacing is 16 inches from the nearest corner. most any tape measure will have 16 inch markings for stud locations. But be aware this method isn't always 100% as some times they might be a much as 2 inches off.
- attics are also another great place to run cable. locate the room below you want to run cable to and drill from the attic to that rooms closet if it has one to conceal the cable.
- most homes have a molding around the floor. you can remove it with a pry bar without damaging it and cut holes into the sheet rock or plaster and run wire through them. Replace the molding to cover up the hole. always remember to not make the hole higher then the molding otherwise you just made a mess. This is a good way to get cable from one room to adjacent room/closet.
- If you do have forced air heating/cooling you can run cable inside the ducts. If you do decide to do this make sure you use plenum rated cable to stay compliant with local/national building codes.
- Buying cable can sometimes be a problem as you do not know what type or brand to buy. there are two basic cable types regular jackets which most likely be PVC or plenum rated. Plenum cable is designed to give off little or no toxic smoke when burned. this is used inside buildings that use the space inside a drop ceiling as an air duct as well. Also if you plan to run the cable inside an air duct you must use plenum cable to comply with national building codes. So if its just the inside of your home walls the cheap PVC is fine. Also don't go overboard and buy expensive beldin cat 5e stuff. I bought a roll and found it difficult to work with when it came to making patch cables. The crap they sell at the Home Depot is just fine and works good even for gigabit.
These are good ways to conceal cable and do it the same way an electrical contractor would. Some of you might be a little nervous knocking a hole on a wall or ripping up floor boards but if you want to do it yourself and save big bucks you certainly can. I have personally ran over 500ft of cat5 in my home to 10 different computers in 5 different rooms in my home. And if you ever saw the work you would think a contractor did it.
First: Choice of plate terminators, angled is good! THG said it, they keep out dust, and in a home with kids this is a very good thing.
Second: finding cable runs is a very good thing. You can't go wrong if you choose where your cable is going very carefully. Just think, that 50' length of expensive Cat6 you just cut won't reach to the one place you need it, like the office upstairs where your Significant Other wants to place his/her computer because he/she likes the view. Also, stringing cable outside means that you could be letting in bugs (ants, termites, wasps and bees come to mind, all of which are detrimental to any home owner) and rodents (mice can easilly tear open a hole if they get a handhold).
Third: Neatness factor was a plus. Those nifty cable loops that they used to string the cable around the basement means no holes. Not boring holes in load-bearing joists and studs can save your bum if you are moving in say... a grand piano and your movers drop it right on that critical spot.
Mentioning some of the hardware used: great! I like seeing hardware mentioned. This means I can go out and look up honest-to-god reviews of it elsewhere if all the information isn't available on the first review I check. Also, pointing out the cable tester they used was important. When/if I decide to wire my own home I'll deffinitely look for a similar tool.
Cable versus DSL et al: another good point, find out who supplies what in your area and can you use it? Also, how much does it cost? Personally I would not have opted for DirecTV and just gone with cable all-around. But that was his choice.
I agree, overall this review could have used alot more meat in the "why'd we choose this bit of kit over that." department. However, as we all know the internet has an almost unlimited supply of information on any topic, just go look it up!
However, consulting with a contractor can be a very useful tool, even if you decide not to use the services of that contractor, they can provide you with useful information free of charge! If we all could do spot-on wiring of our houses the first time through we wouldn't need contractors for anything. On top of that, if you all missed it, the article mentioned that the writer and his family were prepairing to move in to a new home. As anyone who has moved in to a new home, and supervised its construction, knows that getting other people to do grunt work is a good thing.
Once more into the birch deer fiends!
I wish I'd read this before I attempted - now I have a few (ok, 8) unsightly holes in my wall.
Worst of all, it was a wireless network. *rimshot* Thank you. You've been a great crowd.
Installed in mid 2001 in Australia. At that time, the cost of getting 9 x ethernet ports, 10 x telephone outlets between two lines, TV cable to 4 extra locations and changing existing crappy 600-series telephone sockets to RJ-11 was cheaper than buying wireless bridging gear for the three main computers I had at that time.
:P And I don't feel like implementing 802.1X/LEAP/VPNs at home either.
Plus I got 100mbit ethernet instead of 11mbit wireless, and it meant that in the future I was able to add a networked printer in another room without having to buy yet more wireless gear.
While I'm more than capable of doing the wiring myself (I have done in many north american homes), in Australia many homes, such as mine, are all brick, instead of stud and dry-wall. This makes installing the points a significantly difficult task, so for A$1400 all up (US$700 at the time), I think I got out of it pretty well. This also included a 8 port switch and signal amp for the TV signal.
I don't trust wireless security to the point of wanting my own access point, thanks muchly. I can put it in my insecure DMZ, but someone might use my bandwidth and monthly data allowance, which just costs me more
I've read the comments and I hear people saying, "Use Wireless, it's less hassle," as well as networking horror stories.
Well, I've got about both. My first day on the job as a High-Speed Cable installer, I ran my drill through a power main. Knocked me on my ass, and I had to buy a new drill and pay to have the customers house re-wired. Not a fun experience. What did I learn? Look on both sides of the walls, and always ask the customer if they'd like their jack there.
In my 'house,' Each 'Data box' has 2 Cat5E, a fiber, 2 2-line phone jacks, and 2 Coax. I use this so I can provide a secure/DMZ, have the ability to upgrade, as well as send signals (e.g., videocams) to other devices in my house. The only reason that I use wireless is so I can use the occassional Free Access point that's floating about, and war-driving. My WAP in my house is on, however, it's on a seperate vlan, and no one really uses it.
Stay away from wireless--sure it's easy, but, do you really want your data out there for the world to see? For the effort that you use to run your wire and make sure the job is done right (e.g., use Mini-Com's from Panduit, make sure they're snapped down all the way, and make sure you've punched down everything/terminated your fiber right), you'll have the satisification that you've done a job right, and that your data is safe and secure.
I disable sigs...do you?
I did mine (a small 3 bedroomed detached house in England) all by myself.
I was fortunate in the fact my walls are of plasterboard construction so I had no problems running cable down them, except between floors. I put a switch and a wireless router in the attic.
What did I learn?
a) If doing it again I would use some conduit pipe to make rewiring easier. However I did put 4 CAT5 ports in each room, which is enough for any small house!
b) buy a big roll of cable and make your own cables - its much cheaper that way.
c) Plan and check before you knock holes in walls
d) I'm a good network installer but a terrible plasterer, put any holes in walls where they'll be most hidden
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It is for example, not unknown when doing big copper wiring jobs in business to put dark fibre in at the same time, because it's the laying of the cables that is expensive, not the cable itself.
Say it costs you $500 to lay the copper. If you lay fibre as well it comes out at say $600. If you don't lay fibre, and three years later realise you need it after all, then the final cost will be $1100.
So you have a $100 bet with yourself that you will need fibre later. If you don't, you loose $100. If you do, you win $500. Now, considering how geeky you are to be thinking about this at all, what are the odds like?
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Don't fuck around. Need a hole? Use a sledgehammer. Fast, makes a nice, neat hole that's big enough for about 115 Cat5 cables. None of this sissy shit like wireless and threading little bitty cables through little bitty holes and fastening the ends on only AFTER threading the cables.
Worried about the landlord? Screw that! If you can afford more than one computer then you can afford to lose the security deposit.
Oh... and then do what I did. Move to New Zealand. Mwahhahahahaha
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.
Cat 5e is more durable than cat 6? What, exactly, do you mean by this? In the long haul, a Cat 6 solution is cheaper. "'The benefits of category 6 vs. category 5e are eye-opening,' says Brian Celella, a lead electrical engineer for The Siemon Company and an active member of the TR-42 committee. 'For small additional investment, you can have a cabling infrastructure that will deliver significantly higher bandwidth and system performance. When weighed against the time end-users wait for processing or downloads - real productivity time - a category 6 system is actually less expensive than a category 5e system.'"
I say run cat 6. Not only do you get more performance, but with all the interference generated in the home (office, school, anywhere), you'd benefit from the tighter twists in cat 6 as opposed to cat 5e.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
People like you should not be allowed to connect to the Internet. The Internet is about cooperation, and laziness is not acceptable. You're selfish if all you think about is your network. Consider what someone could do if they gained illegal access to your network and used it to attack other people? OK, if that doesn't convince you then consider your neighbors browsing child porn through your WAP gateway and trying to explain to your dumb hick cops that you're not the one doing it when they come bust down your door.
I don't run WEP, but secure my network by changing the default ip address of my router and disabling DHCP. So you have to know the correct subnet to use to get on my network and assign your own ip address.
You're not "securing" your network by changing the address and disabling DHCP. You're making an attacker take an additional few seconds before jumping on your network. Sniffing your network for a few minutes will reveal what address range should be used.
A better solution:
1) disable SSID broadcasting. Note that this is simply a "good" thing to do-- SSIDs can still be sniffed in normal traffic.
2) Use MAC filtering-- i.e. set your access point to only allow the mac addresses for the cards you have. This helps, but does *not* prevent others from stealing your mac for acccess.
3) Use the lame WEP
4) Use a VPN. Have your wireless in your DMZ (behind a firewall) and in front of another one. Have the internal firewall allow though the port(s) required for for your laptops to authenticate to your internal VPN server.
You can use IPSEC, CIPE, OpenVPN, vtun, or even PPP over SSH (not recommended). I personally like OpenVPN, although there is no Windows client at the moment (there is for IPSEC and CIPE though).
Configure your externally facing firewall to NOT
allow packets out from your wireless-- instead those packets need to come from your VPN server.
If somebody gets access to your wireless network they then cannot access the internet nor can they access your home network.
Running something like arpwatch looking for new MAC addresses is a nice thing as well, but if you're using mac address filtering it should be impossible for any other mac to authenticate on your network anyway.
-- I speak only for myself.
Orange / White
Orange
Green / White
Blue
Blue / White
Green
Brown / White
Brown
When you have the connector in your hand with the pins facing you, that is the order to line them up in (left to right.)
I am not saying it is the only way to do it, but it is the only way I do it.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer