Bit of a rest

I haven't been posting mostly because we haven't been doing much. We're trying to unpack a little and get settled a bit, but mostly we're taking a break from everything. I've been working on getting our family room set up, A/V-wise. It hasn't been very easy, because the whole house is wired. Oddly, that's making it tougher than it would otherwise be right now. I'm going to find a way to work it to my advantage, though. Here's the situation right now. Remember this guy?

This is the vaunted "Structural Wiring" panel in the basement. You can't see it very well, so I made a diagram for you.

It looks pretty simple, and as near as I can tell, it is pretty simple. However, it also seems like it isn't really working very well. Unfortunately the manual for it is a little vague on some very important topics, and the websites for the companies involved are almost astonishingly unhelpful. Here's my understanding of all of this after having read the manual and doing some testing.

It all starts with the main cable line. That comes in from the outside and plugs into the CATV port in the top portion. The signal from there is distributed to the coax ports on the right. It's more or less an 8-way splitter. It's powered so it may be doing some kind of repeating instead of just splitting, but the function is similar. The 8 plugs on the left are other inputs. This is a neat idea, but I have yet to find anything useful to do with them. If you had a lot of video sources that output their signals on a coax cable, you could plug them into those ports and the signal would be visible on any TV hooked up to one of the ports on the right. Nothing except an NES or a VCR actually has a coax out anymore, so this is pretty much useless. You can use an RF modulator or something to turn a composite video signal into  coax, but at that point you're really talking about low quality. I still might do it, but I'm not as excited about it as I was.

The other ports up there will likely remain unused by me. The Video port is actually an input for security cameras. the company that makes this panel also makes security cameras with a coax output so you can plug it in here. From there, any TV in the house can view the camera feed, which is a neat idea. I'm not going to be installing security cameras (or am I?) so I won't be dealing with it. The other input is for satellite dishes, to distribute their signals to the other TVs in the house. We're not planning on getting satellite, so that's also out for us. That's the top panel.

The left lower panel is the "Data Center" as they call it. Right now, I call it the "Stone Age Crap Center" because that's roughly what it is. It's a 4-port hub, not a switch. For those of you who aren't big on tech, the difference is that hubs are slow and stupid and switches are fast and smart. Hubs slow down your traffic and drop information, switches organize your data so things don't get lost and keep it going at a good speed. The even worse part is that the hub is 10 Base-T which makes it about as slow as it can be and still be considered functional. Switches moved through 10 to 10/100 and are now at 10/100/1000. Soon they'll be up to 3000. Those numbers mean about as much to me as they probably do to you, but suffice it to say they're getting much faster. So, this data center is entirely useless to me.

Instead, I'm going to go with an 8-port 10/100 switch. Here's how the new setup will look:

Fancy, eh? I like making diagrams of these things so I can keep track of how much of everything I'll need. I'm going to need a load of 3' Cat5e patch cables, for sure. Anyway, back to functionality. The coax cable goes into the modem, comes out as network cable, goes into the router. This is an important step, and can't be avoided. Your cable provider will give you one IP address for your house. Your router will assign IP addresses to each other item in the house that is hooked to it. This is very important because every item on your network needs to have its own IP address so they don't get confused about where things are coming from or going to. I originally did this without the router and even though several items were hooked in, only one at a time could get internet access. Lesson learned. Thanks to Doyle for the heads-up on that one. So now you have your router (which probably has 1 input port and 4 output ports) but where do you go from there? For me, I have more than 4 things that need to be hooked up. A lot more. An 8-port 10/100 switch is pretty cheap, and it's a good way to split your signals. If you're planning on transferring lots of files across your network on a regular basis, it might make sense to spend on the Gigabit switches (those are the 10/100/1000 I mentioned earlier) so your computers talk to each other more quickly. It won't speed up the internet (since that's like 20 Mb per second at the most, and even your 10/100 switch won't ever get topped out at that rate) but it will speed up internal file transfers. If you're way more advanced than I am and you have a video server somewhere that streams HD video to various sources around the house, then gigabit is the way to go. I'm not that guy.

So, as you can see, we're going to have a whole lot of wires plugging into the switch in the basement to connect all the wall panels to the main source. This will also create a home network, which is an added bonus. It means we can access files from one computer from another computer. The really cool thing this allows us to do is to use the receiver in the family room as a media player, and play music or movies from any computer in the house. I haven't actually done any of this yet, but it should be possible for sure. You'll also notice that we have a switch plugged into a switch. This is acceptable, and is sometimes even preferable to plugging both switches into separate ports on the router. Really, as long as there is a router between the modem and the end product, you're probably going to be okay. The switch in the basement will get signal to all of the wall ports in the rooms, and a local switch in the family room will also split the signal out to our different toys. Brilliant!

So that's really what I've been doing. Trying to get everything set up properly now that we have cable and internet in the house. We have some plans for this weekend, too. Tonight we're going to the cabinet store to see about getting another upper cabinet and a replacement drawer for the one the previous owners mangled. I don't know what they did to it, and I shudder to think about the horrors that drawer must have endured. You're going to a better place now, drawer.

As always, thanks for reading. I know this was a bit less constructiony than my normal posts, so if you have any questions or if I explained anything especially poorly, please let me know.