It’s Sunday somewhere already so why wait?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
I’ll post my ongoing things later/tomorrow but I didn’t want to forget the post again.
My NAS and our desktops are all on WiFi, so I’m planning to run some cable or install moca or something. Our uplink is currently only 100mbit (max for this ISP, I refuse to switch) but our city plans to roll out gigabit everywhere in the next couple years, so I want something forward compatible (powerline will probably be too limiting). SO has been complaining about latency, and I think the WiFi card is to blame, so I’m trying this before upgrading the WiFi card.
Our house has the following:
I’m going to try running some cable tomorrow (holiday in the US, just want a test run from bedroom internet source -> basement water heater room), but if that doesn’t work, I’ll need a backup plan.
Anyone have experience with any of the above? Tips?
Go slow. measure 4 times. most rooms don’t need a jack so put APs where it is easy to ge wires and that will feed the other rooms.
That’s a massive project that I would like to one day embark on myself. I’m in a ranch with a basement so it should be a breeze. Ha, not! Good luck!
No experience with most of that stuff, but I would also try to avoid powerline. Tried it and had pretty bad performance.
This may sound dumb or be helpful so I’ll toss it in just in case:
Depending on when they’re built, a lot of houses’ RJ-11 phone jacks are actually using CAT-5E. If you’re lucky, they’re individual runs and not daisy-chained!
The way they set up the runs here is weird though, they’re cat-5E but we have no fancy junction box. It all runs to some hatch on the side of the house presumably for telecom/satellite TV installers. So you might have secret ethernet cable behind your landline jacks, even if there’s no tidy junction box! :)
It was cool finding out there’s already capable infrastructure in the walls, but you gotta replace the wall jacks with RJ-45 using a tone tool to label which one goes where, and then the next trick is figuring out an affordable switch that can handle a garage that could get to 100ºF + in summer…
But anyway, worth checking before you start getting too deeply sunk into other solutions. :)
It was built in the late 80s so I doubt it’s cat5. But I also know the basement was finished later, so maybe I’ll get lucky at least with those.
I just need to figure out where it’s all going to see if I can reuse it.
Another interesting thing is the previous owner ran speaker wire to the master bed, living room, and basement room exactly where I want to go, so maybe can reuse those runs.