I’ve listed 2 of the 3 replaced switches on eBay. If anyone wants a bargain, get bidding on them!

• Planet GSW 400S Gigabit Ethernet Switch (GSW-400S)
• Planet 24 port managed 10/100 switch w/gig fibre

We recently had our latest electricity bill in, and it was pretty huge. To try to reduce the next bill, reduce the heat output of the cabinet and speed up the network I decided to combine 5 switches into one.

Before now all devices in the house have been connected to one of 3 switches: a 5 port gigabit switch (4 usable ports, 1 for uplink), a 24 port managed 10/100 switch, and a 4 port managed gigabit switch (3 usable ports, 1 for uplink. These switches used a combined 51 watts, and are on continuously, although lately I’ve switched the 4 port gigabit switch off to reduce the noise levels in the cabinet.

I have now replaced these 3 switches with a single 24 port unmanaged gigabit switch. It was a 2nd hand purchase from eBay, and had 2 faulty fans. I’ve replaced one of the fans and left the other disconnected with no problems so far. This switch uses about 17 watts of power.

In addition to consuming 34 watts less, I’ve also freed up 1u of space. With all the amplifiers, computers, networking equipment etc. space is starting to become a premium and the weight of the rack is becoming a concern.

Today I added the final 4 network points - there are now a total of 24 around the house.

The wiring project started about 14 months ago, with the plan to have at least 2 network points in all rooms except the bathroom. The final distribution has ended up as:

• Living room: 6
• Dining room: 4
• Kitchen: 2
• Pantry: 4
• Landing: 2
• Bedroom 1: 4
• Bedroom 3: 2

Despite considering that 24 ports might be a little excessive, I’ve come to realise that 24 ports isn’t quite enough especially when it comes to distributing analogue audio & video over CAT5 (i.e. not as IP data) since at least one port is required for each A/V combination depending on the quality of the signal desired. The living room should probably have 4 more ports, the kitchen could do with at least 2 more and a couple by the front door would come in useful for security purposes.

I’ve learnt a lot from the experience of doing this wiring, such as how to lift floorboards, that lathe & plaster ceilings are extremely fragile and plastering is nowhere near as easy as it looks.

Running the cables before moving in was certainly a good idea. It would have taken me probably another 12 months otherwise to get to this stage. It’s taken a lot more work than I expected, although the overall time is down to being in a lazy, bored and/or apathetic mood most weekends. I’m glad I did it though - the ports have come in useful for the MythTV system, for the family computer and soon enough the whole-house audio system. I’m also using them to trial some IP video cameras.

I’ve finally managed to find somewhere to buy stuff to tidy up some of the cabling around the house. A couple of weeks ago I ordered some trunking and a cable tray (which will replace the improvised MDF/timber one I constructed from offcuts) from Minitran.

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There are two main wiring routes that are part of my ongoing project to wire up our house for A/V and data distribution - one goes from the bottom of my wardrobe directly down to the room below, and the other goes across a short stretch of the landing and down into the pantry.

Until yesterday, the 4 x speaker and 6 x CAT5 cables going to the pantry were laid under the carpet, then pushed down through a hole in a floodboard and the corresponding hole in the pantry ceiling. The reason for this was simply that it was too much work at the time to run the cables properly, i.e. beneath the floorboards. At the time when I was running the cables, we weren’t living in the house so I only had relatively short visits in which to do the work.

I spent most of yesterday improving the situation by pulling up flooadboards, drilling holes in joists and reaching around in the dirt. All but 2 of the cables that were fed under the carpet are now out of sight under the floorboards of the landing. The remaining 2 cables are CAT5 feeds to bedroom 3, which take a slightly different route to the main runs and are already connected at both ends.

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Here’s a video I’ve put together about some of my projects. Sorry about the wobblyness and wonkyness - I’m not sure where I’ve put my tripod.

Before we moved into our new house, I lifted some of the carpets and floorboards and installed some runs of cat5 and speaker cable. In total there are 24 cat5 cables and 4 pairs of speaker cable. I’m not sure the length of network cable that was used, but a rough estimate is 400m - not quite as impressive as some other installations I’ve seen details of, but it’s a fair amount to pull on your own! I know exactly how much speaker cable was used though, because I used the whole reel - 100m.

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The standard SSH server does not come with any usable form of SSH brute force attack prevention, but with a few firewall rules it’s possible to implement something that works quite well. I have set up the rules on 2 machines with great success. To make sure that I dont get locked out accidentally though I added an extra rule before these to allow access from my trusted network. If you only have remote access to the machine, it may be a good idea to do the same.

I’ve tried to set up a VPN in the past, to create a secure permenant link between the server on which this site is hosted and my home network. I tried both PPTP in the form of Poptop and ipsec implementation FreeS/WAN. Today I succeeded in producing a nicely routed connection with reasonably low latency, using OpenVPN. I think I’d looked into this in the past but I dont think the documentation was as good back then. Now I’ve found that there’s a simple guide to setting up a basic connection with static keys. If you’re lazy (like me) there’s also a Webmin module for OpenVPN, which provides you with some more advanced options. It probably took me about half an hour to figure out and set up the connection.

The bonus thing is that there’s an OpenVPN client for Windows too! I’ve installed it on Vista without problems, but not got around to testing it yet. If I ever find a use for and get a laptop, and I make the mistake of running Windows, at least I’ll be able to connect into my home network.

Debian Sarge users may find this hint handy if receiving an error saying that the nodes under /dev don’t exist.