Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Home Networking update

A while back I'd mentioned that I was planning to wire the house with gigabit ethernet. Two things happened that delayed this:

1) After going into the crawlspace under the house to see how stuff should be routed, we noticed we had a little rodent problem. Exterminator was brought in, holes sealed up, insulation replaced, etc, etc. Problem now (we hope) solved.

2) Anyone who's ever done any running of cables in an existing house can tell you: it's a heck of a job. Takes a long time, lots of crawling around in crawlspaces, frustrating fishing of wires blindly, etc. So, I was basically procrastinating on actually starting, because once I did, it was going to take a while.

Well, I started.

  • On Sunday I cut a hole in the garage wall and installed a Leviton Structured Media Center Enclosure (nice way to say Big Metal Box All The Wires Go To)
  • Monday night I measured and cut the first four Cat6 cables, crimped female snap-in connectors to them, and fished the wires through to the crawlspace.
(The first 4 connectors were all for the media room: Media center PC, Xbox, ReplayTV, and one for future expansion. Could use my fourth for my PS2 I suppose, but who'd want to do that?)

In all, I'll be set up for up to 16 ports though I only have 12 planned: 4 in the media room, 4 in my office, 2 in Alisa's office, 1 in the bedroom, and 1 in the guest room.

The adventure continues tonight! Wired home, here I come!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Try doing this in California where houses are typically constructed on a slab and have NO crawlspaces.

I ended up doing some outside wiring to link up the family room with my office.