Home Network Organization
Our home network’s grown over the past week or so, adding on the new hosts from Mr. Marino. This together with having to stare at the mess of the cable modem and the router next to my main workstation compelled me to re-organize the mess that was our home network wiring.
The basement setup, circa Janurary 2005
The problem was that the hardware was not in a central location, making it hard to do patching or re-routing. This was due to bad planning - the basement network segment was added after the main location in the library, almost as an afterthought. A single 100Mbps link between the two segments was just begging for bottlenecking.
The solution, then was to relocate the cable modem and wireless router into the basement, so that the center of the house is where the main network segment is based. The single link up to the Library is still there, but now that just provides for fairer distribution of resources.
The question was how to arrange all of the equipment in a semi-secure manner, which would still be easy to maintain. I had known about the possibility of mounting everything to a block of wood, but I wasn’t too thrilled with that idea because I don’t know the first thing about working with wood. Searching the web for an answer, I found an ingenius idea on Slashdot, which included strapping the hardware to the sides of a plastic cube. Since I knew we had many such cubes around the house, I decided to try that option.
After finding a suitable cube, and waiting ’till everyone in the house was (supposed to be asleep), I got to work. First step was to disconnect everything in the library to take it down stairs. Then I needed to re-route the cable line to go to the center of the basement instead of up to the library. The next step was attaching all of the hardware to the sides of the cube. This was probably the most fun of the entire process. I attached the the Gigabit switch, VoIP TA, Cable Modem, Wireless Router, and power strip to power it all, all to the inside of the cube. Then I attached the power cables/supplies for each of them and made them as neat as possible with the help off some more cable ties. Last step was to patch everything together, bring the network back up, and make sure everything worked correctly.
The finished product
In total, the network downtime was a little over an hour. The reorganization into the central location should make future adminitration of the network much easier. It might not look that much cleaner, but now the network infrastructure makes alittle more sense.
Now all I need to do is to replace compaq266 (probably marino800)…
Our home network’s grown over the past week or so, adding on the new hosts from Mr. Marino. This together with having to stare at the mess of the cable modem and the router next to my main workstation compelled me to re-organize the mess that was our home network wiring.
The problem was that the hardware was not in a central location, making it hard to do patching or re-routing. This was due to bad planning - the basement network segment was added after the main location in the library, almost as an afterthought. A single 100Mbps link between the two segments was just begging for bottlenecking.
The solution, then was to relocate the cable modem and wireless router into the basement, so that the center of the house is where the main network segment is based. The single link up to the Library is still there, but now that just provides for fairer distribution of resources.
The question was how to arrange all of the equipment in a semi-secure manner, which would still be easy to maintain. I had known about the possibility of mounting everything to a block of wood, but I wasn’t too thrilled with that idea because I don’t know the first thing about working with wood. Searching the web for an answer, I found an ingenius idea on Slashdot, which included strapping the hardware to the sides of a plastic cube. Since I knew we had many such cubes around the house, I decided to try that option.
After finding a suitable cube, and waiting ’till everyone in the house was (supposed to be asleep), I got to work. First step was to disconnect everything in the library to take it down stairs. Then I needed to re-route the cable line to go to the center of the basement instead of up to the library. The next step was attaching all of the hardware to the sides of the cube. This was probably the most fun of the entire process. I attached the the Gigabit switch, VoIP TA, Cable Modem, Wireless Router, and power strip to power it all, all to the inside of the cube. Then I attached the power cables/supplies for each of them and made them as neat as possible with the help off some more cable ties. Last step was to patch everything together, bring the network back up, and make sure everything worked correctly.
In total, the network downtime was a little over an hour. The reorganization into the central location should make future adminitration of the network much easier. It might not look that much cleaner, but now the network infrastructure makes alittle more sense.
Now all I need to do is to replace compaq266 (probably marino800)…
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