More Work on the House

By tadgeobrien, 19 December, 2009

If anyone had checked the weekend of November 8th they may have noticed that the website was up and down a bit. Well for good reason. My friend Danny Wegman and I finished running network cable, CAT 6 to be specific, in the house. Yes I have installed networking throughout my house.

Once we had drilled a bunch of holes, chanted a few choice words, and with Dan's expertise we managed to finish up the wiring. I am so excited that I can now get some speed behind a few of my machines. Some of you may be asking "Why didn't you just go wireless Tadge?" Well for good reasons!

Of course I could have just relied on the wireless infrastructure that I have here in the house the biggest downside however is that it doesn't let me utilize the gigabyte speeds that I have available to me. Wireless with even the best networking equipment out there can only hit 600 MBp/s. That is less than half of what I can do wired. That and I had purchased a nice gigabyte switch so that I could have more then one computer plugged in on my network. That and most often you don't see the max speeds of a wireless network.

So why all this work and worry about speed? Well I have a few applications that I am running here at home that can use the horse power. The first is I have built a brand new Mythbuntu server that will be recording in HD over the air. Now full HD can use that bandwidth if I am going to stream it to other remote boxes in the house such as My XBOx, or Windows computers with XBMC installed on it! So that is the first reason behind this. Also I can manage to stream the DVDs I own across my network as well. Yeah right now I am watching two DVD!

I am guessing that if I had tried this completely with wireless, I might notice a difference somewhere. However no lag yet!

So I have set up my computers in the office, in the basement (AKA My NOC), and the living room. So I have about 5 or so network drops as well as COAX cable. It makes it to all of the bedrooms and some of the general living spaces downstairs. So I can access my music just about anywhere. Besides the Mythbox, Xbox, and Xbox Media Center, I also have my Webserver, a backup server, my laptops that I work with. Each of these have a few different applications running on them.

For example people can access my music via the web ( the select few). If a friend with iTunes comes over I have it so they can login and listen to my music, all 50 GBs of it. Now I am looking to see if I can set up an IP based phone system as well. Eventually I want to be able to create a recipe database and have a few other neat things that I can run. Anyway things are coming up and running well. So expect to hear some more about what I am builiding here at home.