• 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.

Unfortunately the first of two packages arrived late on a friday with only the larger items present – it appeared that the bubblewrap packaging (with no strong outer container) had disintegrated and spilled the smaller items somewhere along the delivery chain. The delivery company were mostly to blame for this, with the delivery driver not having the best attitude and the delivery not even being recorded on the paperwork which is probably why it was the last item to be delivered. The items should have been packed in something stronger but I guess such packaging is hard to come by for 3m x 30cm x 5cm consignments. I was also worried by the fact that my card payment had been manually entered into a PDQ machine, wihch suggests that my card number – submitted via the website – is being stored in plaintext somewhere. These days I would expect all online stores that accept card payments to do so via automated secured systems. Clearly this isn’t the case.

Anyway, I continued with installing what I had – the cable tray, a 3m length of 50×50mm trunking, and 2x 3m lengths of 25×38mm trunking.

The 50mm square trunking was used to tidy up the majority of cables that come through from downstairs. This required being fixed to the wall by screws, which wasnt too difficult. I used a hand mitre saw to make the 90 degree bends. I could have purchased corner joints, but they are over £7 each and would have gotten lost anyway. The mitre saw did a great job and the result looks neat.

After I had got the first lot of trunking installed I set to work on the cable tray. The tray is made from a steel wire mesh which is lighter than standard cable tray, looks fairly good and lets light through. The problem was, though, that I had to figure out how to securely mount it without using the steel rods and support brackets that had gone missing. I settled on doing what I had done with the improvised cable tray and used the picture rail to my advantage.

The tray had to be cut to size, about 50cm shorter than the 3m length. With the help of a dremmel this wasnt too hard. I initally left some spare length so that I could bend the wires around and then use them to fix the tray to the picture rail with screws. This didn’t quite work as I had hoped though. To bend the extra length I had to cut part-way through the wires and carefully bend them. I then intended to solder the bends to strengthen them up a little. This plan didn’t work, and I ended up removing the bent parts altogether.

Thanks to the tray being relatively light and strong it turned out that there was no need to fix it to the walls. Just resting on the picture rail keeps it secure enough.

The smaller trunking contains the cables from the other side of the house – from the pantry, bedroom 3 and the landing. This was self-adhesive so was a lot quicker to fit. The cables only just fitted inside though.

Once all of the trunking was installed, I re-ran all of the cables to the cabinet, tidying them as much as I could along the way. This involved lots of cable ties, spiral wrap and patience. As part of this, the remaining network cables were run to the cabinet and connected up to the patch panel. Unfortunatley the back of the patch panel is an unavoidable mess. At one point I thought of disconnecting, trimming and reconnecting the cables that were already connected but this proved far too difficult so I just tried to keep things as tidy as possible.

After clearing up the cables inside the cabinet, things look a lot neater in there (if you ignore the back of the patch panel). This makes it a lot easier to work around the back and portrays a more professional appearance.

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.

The floor boards were lifted using a reciprocal saw, which cut through the thick ~100-year-old planks like a knife through butter that’s just come out of the fridge. The holes in the joists were mostly drilled using a 32mm drill bit, the largest I had available.

There was one close call with an unexpected mains cable which had been routed through the joist only a few millimetres from the floorboard I was cutting into. Fortunately the outer insulation was barely grazed.

Before the cables were re-routed, they had to be pulled back up through the pantry ceiling. As the photo below shows, this resulted in a lot of spaghetti! Running each cable individually allowed me to untangle the mess and straighten the cables out.

The speaker cables were run first since they are larger and heavier, and so naturally like to sit at the bottom of the holes. The CAT5 runs were pulled in the order that they come through the bedroom/landing wall, so as to keep them as neat as possible.

Now that the cables have been run, I can continue with the wiring project by adding the endpoints – the RJ45 sockets and speakers. More on the progress of this soon.

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.

At the time I wasn’t sure where the cables were going to terminate in my room (Node Zero), so I tried to leave plenty of slack. For most of the cables I’ve left more than enough for them to terminate in the newly constructed rack, but for the rest I may have to re-run or move the locations of the ports.

So far 5 pairs of ports have been installed – 3 pairs in the living room, 1 pair in the dining room and 1 pair on the landing. That leaves 7 pairs – 1 pair in the kitchen, 2 pairs in the master bedroom, 1 more pair in the dining room, 1 pair by the front door, 1 pair in the pantry and 1 pair in the third bedroom.

The wiring guide at Automated Home was a great help when it came to labelling the cables. The suggestion on that page is to use insulation tape of different colours to identify cables, much like the colour coding on a resistor. I had more than enough colours, so 2 bands were sufficient.

There have been a few challenges while running the cables. Some of the bricks in this house are extremely hard, enough so that it takes a lot of effort with a high-quality SDS drill to even drill holes for rawplugs. Some of the bricks are also engineer’s bricks, which render the cable finder useless. On the other end of the scale the ceiling plaster is lathe-and-plaster and is extremely fragile. While pulling the cables into the pantry, where they will run to the kitchen, front door and dining room, a large chunk of plaster god dislodged. This has sinced worsened with the vibrations from the staircase, and the entire ceiling in the pantry is slowly falling apart.

Horizontal runs of the cables currently go underneath the carpets. The ones that are attached to ports are protected by fixing cable channel (normally used when plastering over cables) in the hope of reducing the chance of cables becoming pinched by heavy weights. The runs on the landing (see below) are going to be re-run beneath the floorboards as part of the construction of an en-suite in the master bedroom.

After ordering the parts for the ports, I discovered that I could have used much shallower back-boxes if I had used 90 degree connectors instead of the 180 degree ones that I bought. Not a major problem since most of the ports aren’t visible, but it’s something to take note of if you plan on doing a similar project.

Like the other projects, this is a work in progress. More to come as the work progresses.

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.