Building the home network
By john on Jul 9, 2008 in featured
When I first moved into my house (almost two months ago), I didn’t really plan on having a robust home network – and certainly had no plans on doing any network wiring. I planned on having my home office machines wired to an airport extreme base station, and the remainder of my gear using the airport’s wireless capabilities. That initial concept failed to take into account on very important thing: my servers.
You see, unlike many home networks, my home network incorporates multiple servers ( a mix of Dell PowerEdge’s and Apple XServe’s). My initial plan was to have those reside in a noise reducing cabinet enclosure (XRack Pro), in my home office. Before I could buy one, however, a good friend of mine told me he had one I could borrow for an extended period of time – the catch being that it was significantly larger than the one I planned on buying (I planned on buying a 4U enclosure, this is a 14U enclosure), and there was just no way I was going to get this thing upstairs. The plan then became to put it in the garage – the noise wouldn’t be an issue out there. At first I was worried about heat, but my buddy has his rack in his garage and showed me the temperature readouts on his servers – all within normal and acceptable temperature levels. Besides – I won’t be putting a huge load on these servers, so they should be OK.
Then the realization hit me – how am I going to connect the servers in the garage to the workstations in the office upstairs? The obvious answer is to utilize some structured wiring, but this is a job I’m not at all well suited for – time to call in the professionals.
I asked my buddy who is loaning me the rack if he had any recommendations, since he recently had his home wired up. He said he used a company called Technology Interiors that specialize in home theater system installations and structured wiring – cautioning me that while they are excellent at what they do, they’re definitely NOT cheap. I decided to give them a shout to see if they could get me covered.
They definitely aren’t cheap, but thankfully I have money budgeted for this kind of thing (money I had planned on using for a rack enclosure, for instance) – so that wasn’t really a concern for me. What IS a concern is that it’s something done RIGHT – not half-assed.
I have the appointment for the wiring set for tomorrow, and am set to work from home while it’s taking place so I can be around (I don’t like people wandering through my house if I’m not there). We’ll see how well they do.
My needs are pretty simple in theory – I’m going to have two connections run down to the garage from my home office, possibly two more run down from the master and guest bedrooms (1 each, and they share a wall so that should be easy) and one from behind the entertainment center into the garage. This will allow me to have connections from where I need them for my computers that would benefit from hardwired connections, and will let me use wireless on the remainder of my devices (iPhone, Macbook Pro, Ann’s Powerbook) from anywhere. I’ll also be futureproofing the house for the future, when Ann wants to use the second bedroom as her home office – she’ll have a network drop available to her for gigabit networking.
The garage will have my patch panel, my two managed gigabit switches and 7 servers ( five linux, two xserves). Most likely not all of the servers will be powered up until I really have/find a need for them. I don’t want to suck down TOO much power needlessly.
This should be a pretty cool setup once it’s finished. It’s certainly not the cheap way to do things, but again – in this case I’m more interested in doing things “right” than I am doing things “cheap”.
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