I have received several requests for a tour of my home network so here you go.
I have dedicated an entire closet to be the heart of my home network.
I actually screwed a piece of plywood to the wall so that I could freely mount any network
hardware that I needed.
My main connection to the internet is this standard old cable modem, provided by Charter
Cable.
I actually have 2 terabytes of file storage.
The way I have this configured is with 4 hard drives, each one being 1 terabyte.
However, only two of the hard drives are used for file sharing.
The other two are backup drives and each night a script is run to automatically clone the
data from the main hard drives.
These drives are all daisy chained through a single firewire connection on this old Mac
Mini G4, which works as my file server and web server, amongst other things.
I also do my voice narration recording in here.
That is why I have the big microphone connected.
All of these ethernet cables go up into the attic where they're distributed around the
house to wall jacks, like this one.
I labeled each jack with a number that corresponds to a particular port on a particular switch.
That way if I ever need to troubleshoot a connection, I know where the other end goes.
I'm a strong believer in ethernet.
While I do have two wireless access points in my house, one at each end, I do not use
these for anything except mobile devices.
So I have quite a few things connected to my ethernet switches.
I'll show you some of it.
I have a color laser printer.
I do not believe in inkjet printers.
I think they are a big waste of money since the ink costs more than the printer.
I also have a black and white laser, copier, and scanner on the network.
This is my main office, or computer room.
This is how things look day to day, I didn't clean anything up for you.
This is my main computer, which is a Mac Mini.
This is where I edit all of my videos.
Here is a workbench I use for everything from repairing computers to shooting videos of
things.
These two Mac Mini setups are for my two kids.
I even have a computer in my garage.
I have a cheap monitor on the wall and this old Mac Mini G4.
I use it mostly for displaying PDF images or searching the web while I'm working on
projects in the garage.
This is my wife's desk, and yes it stays that messy most of the time.
This is my living room TV.
Besides the Nintendo Wii, you'll also little black Western Digital box.
This thing is wired into my network and allows me to watch Netflix, Hulu, or files stored
on my local main file server.
I have one of these on every TV in the house.
This is essentially our only source of television content.
We have no cable or satellite.
Well, I hope you enjoyed the tour.
I would just like to point out that a lot of people think I have this extravogent, expensive
computer network.
And really, I don't.
Most of the equipment I've bought used off of eBay for nearly nothing.
So I don't have a lot of money invested in my network.
But what I do have a lot invested is time.
Particularly when it comes to running all of the ethernet cables.
I've typically done it over a period of years on an as-needed basis.
I started off with one switch, then two, and now three.
And it more or less works like this.
We re-arrange a room and we're like "Oh well, now we need an ethernet jack over here" so
I run a new jack.
And just over a period of several years I've ended up with nearly 48 network jacks in the
house, so I have a live ethernet jack on every wall.
I'm really, really a proponent of ethernet.
I mean, I know everybody loves wireless because it's so convenient.
And nearly every device I have in the house is capable of wireless but I just don't like
it because it's not fast enough, its not reliable enough, it's too complicated.
You've got to deal with SSID's, encryption, interference problems, and range issues and
you know, so I just do not use wireless unless it's a mobile device like an iPad, or laptop,
or iPhone, or iPod, or something like that.
Everything else, I just much prefer to plug the wire in.
It works, and it always works, and it keeps on working, and I don't have to worry about
any of the complicated mess of wireless.
So that's just the way I do things.
Anyway, leave some comments.
Tell me what you think.
Till next time!