My Home Network is finally complete.... for now

[oppie1]

I just recently purchased my first house, and the first thing i did to it before painting or moving my stuff in was to wire it up. I decided on 1 coax/3 cat5e drops to each location, with the exception of my office; which only needed 3 cat5e lines, and my living room I decided to pull 4. Its always nice to pull extra cat5e to each location instead of finding out years down the road i needed another line. All my materials (coax,wire,keystone jacks, wallplates) were all free since i work at Comcast, i just used whatever was on my truck.

I have 20 cat 5 drops all terminated to a cat5e patch panel (another freebie) in the basement. That is the main location for all my network equipment. My internet connection comes from Comcast to a Motorola SB6120 modem. there it feeds to my Linksys gigabit router running DD-WRT. I have an extra Linksys router running dd-wrt acting as a switch, until i can find a good price on one of those TRENDnet 8 port GREENnet gigabit switch.

Also at my network location, I have an old box running freeNAS acting as my media server to my PS3 in the Living Room, WDTV Live in my bedroom, and xbox running XBMC in my stepsons room. I do have Wifi in the house which is just mainly for my ipad,our iphones, and for any guests (i prefer everything else hardwired).

All in all this was a fun project, and i'm constantly tinkering with it. I would like to get a real rack, instead of just having everything mounted to a wood board. but that does not need to be done now. Next thing up for me is to put a 4 channel dvr camera system in to monitor the front and back doors.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v191/oppie1/Home Network/SDC11712.jpg - overall shot
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v191/oppie1/Home Network/SDC11713.jpg - main setup
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v191/oppie1/Home Network/SDC11706.jpg - router and modem
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v191/oppie1/Home Network/SDC11704.jpg - patch panel
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v191/oppie1/Home Network/SDC11708.jpg - wire
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v191/oppie1/Home Network/SDC11709.jpg - more wire
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v191/oppie1/Home Network/SDC11715.jpg - 1 keystone jack in bedroom

i'm curious to see pics of your guys setups

 

[MedicBob]

Looks like you used to have Knob and Tube wiring from the ceramic insulator in a pic. Is it all gone?

Looks nice BTW.

 

[oppie1]

Oh yeah. The house had old knob and tube wiring...it's been all replaced with romex

 

[PCTC2]

Nice wiring job! I'm jealous. What you need next is a 12U 4-post rack and put in your patch panel and a 3U rackmount case. Get a rackmountable switch and then use something rackmountable as your router. 😛

I'm in an apartment so wiring will have to wait until I get a house but my network is kinda alright.
I've got a small miniITX box running as a gateway server. Gigabit from WAN to dual Gigabit output to 2 subnets. 192.168.1.1/24 is a guest wireless network on one of the gigabit ports. The other feeds the 10.0.0.1/8 subnet for myself. I've got a few gigabit switches, a few wireless N routers, and a few servers (Mac Mini, a virtualization RHEL server, and a NAS) on the Class A network. When I get a house, I'd like to wire CAT6 to every room to a patch panel in the garage where the gateway server would be (we don't have basements in Southern California). The problem with the apartment is the gap between the "office" area and the U-Verse input. I have to run either a 50ft CAT6 across the floor/ceiling, or run a bridge, either wireless or powerline. I'm doing wireless but it likes to drop off and only has a 56Mb/s bandwidth with the signal quality it gets. Large transfers between servers and my workstation get really slow with the bridge.

 

[Emulex]

you should use a blonder tongue tap for that many RG6