[geeks] wire my house!

[James Fogg]

> " Or go wireless ....
>
> ick.  -something-else- to buy and manage, and while i don't
> imagine my neighborhood is full of crackers it is tight and
> the signal would probably reach the houses across the street.
>  and you can't wardrive a wire.

With the WAP/router in the basement nearly all your signal will be
vertical (filling your house). The horizontal coverage (beyond your
walls) will be very small to non-existant. Stone foundation plus dirt
makes a very good signal attenuator, esp. at Ghz ranges.

When running wires vertically, look for your closets. They are usually
stacked on top of each other and running a wire exposed in the corner of
a closet is not usually considered visually offensive (it's what I do).

For jacks and wire go to Home Depot or Lowes, they carry everything
cheap (including tools). For patch panels (if you want to use one), use
Ebay. For small networks, a box mounted 6-gang RJ45 jack is often
sufficient.

I have access to tools and distribution hardware, so what I did was
place a punchdown panel in the cellar (called a main distribution field)
and ran a 25 pair cable to the 2nd floor and put a punchdown panel there
too (technically called an IDF or intermediate distribution field). 1st
floor rooms have jacks that run in the walls and drop into the cellar.
2nd floor rooms all have jacks that run back to the 2nd floor punchdown.
All connections from the MDF then are punched down to a 48 port RJ45
patch panel.

My phone jacks run in this very same cabling system, and phone jacks are
punched down to a 24 port RJ11 patch panel in the cellar (I have a PBX
so each phone needs its own line).

And yes, I'm running 100mbs ethernet over a 25 pair phone cable, it
works and I don't have packet loss (measured with a Penta-scanner time
domain reflectometer).