I’ve finally started cabling my house (by alaric)
A check with the trusty cable tester and, apart from a scare which turned out to just be that I'd not plugged the cable all the way into the socket on the tester, both cables checked out!
Then came the fun part. I moved the switch (and attached WiFi access point) from the pile of equipment on the stairs to near the phone sockets, then shifted the interior router, UPS, and home file server from the office, and assembled the entire core network downstairs by the phone sockets: ADSL router, UPS, a VLAN switch, internal router, server, WiFi AP, and USB backup disk. A bit of switch configuration to set up the VLAN trunks for the internal router and server, and it was working.
But would it talk to the upstairs switch when I patched that in? Oh, no. Checked the cable again, and it was fine. Plugged my laptop into the port upstairs, and the link light came on on the switch downstairs, and I could ping things.
Finally, I remembered that the long cable I'd used as the core switch <-> switch trunk before was, of course, a crossover cable. I'd become spoilt by auto-crossover switches. One crossover patch cable substituted in, and pow - the trunk was up and my network was complete again!
One more little job to do: the builders re-plastered our walls, so they removed the BT phone sockets from the wall, but seemed to forget to put them back on. So I did it myself:
Now I need to sort out some adapters so I can use the other cable to carry the two phone lines from downstairs to my desk, so I can plug in the office phone and also have a home-line phone on my desk. At least until I get some decent VoIP equipment and just have a gadget downstairs that converts the two phone lines into VoIP over the network, anyway.
As for putting in other sockets about the place - I'll do that as I need it. We don't need any more sockets in the office, since the layout there means we can just run cables from all the computers to the office switch and have it connect them to the appropriate VLANs. WiFi is fine for laptops in bed and in Jean's room, but we'll need to put a socket up there when she's old enough to have her own desktop PC or a telephone in her room (even if it's a VoIP phone). I don't want to use WiFi for permanent links; if a piece of equipment is stationary, I'd rather give it a cabled network connection for security, reliability (did I mention that we have thick stone walls? They're WiFi-opaque...), and capacity. I'd like to get a wall-mounting touch-screen computer for the kitchen when we're rich, so that'll need a socket. But until we have the need, I won't bother, since it'll be easy to just add sockets as we need them.
However, I do have another Hard Challenge or two.
Building Maintenance, Sci/Tech | alaric | 
Sun 1st Jun 2008 11:55 pm
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By duncan, Mon 2nd Jun 2008 @ 8:56 am
good luck, i laid cat6 throughout my house when the central heating was upgraded - as the plumber had the floorboards up i thought it wise to lay cables. so i decided to put two cables into every room, from the "data cabinet" - where a hot water tank was in the annex. in the end needed rather a large hole to fit 10 cables through - but luckily my plumber had all the required drillbits to hand.
still almost a year on, and ive only wired up 2 of the cables - the patch panel is still in its box awaiting a rainy day when im motivated enough to do the trunking, fix the boxes and test everything.