Back when 3G was being deployed, the massive investment some communications companies made in constructing their next generation networks seemed ludicrous. Now, with the advent of useful smartphones becoming integrated into mainstream society, this provision for a higher speed packet-switched network has become the backbone of non-voice mobile communications. I’m always a skeptic when new [...]
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: [...]
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: [...]
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.
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 [...]
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. You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
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 – [...]
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’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, [...]