Wiring Victorian houses for data...

[sbisson]

...is not as easy as it could be. In fact I have had to go out and buy the largest drill bit I could find in B&Q to finish the latest stage of the networking project...

I've been running a wireless link to my PC for the last few months, and that's been, well, a little slower than I 'd like. I'd also tried IP over the powerlines, but half the kit had to go away to be photgraphed and hasn't come back yet...

The only real solution was to put this PC (and my room) onto the house network with real physical Cat5 cabling. So over the last couple of days I've been drilling holes in walls and ceilings to run a nice long length of ethernet from the switch by the servers down to my room. The cable is currently running under the bathroom floor, through a hole in the downstairs' toilet ceiling and into a looooong hole through a brick wall into the back of the wardrobe in my room.

It's a goodly distance, and was a lot of work - especially when trying to get the cable down through the hole in the ceiling. Still, it's all hooked up now, and I'm connected to the rest of the house at a sprightly 100 Mbps.

Rar!

Comments

Re:

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Look for old gas lighting / servant's bell ducts. In this house they ran the first generation electric lighting cable through them (which is why the fuse box in the old kitchen was made of wood with a glass front, it was originally the box containing the little bells and indicators for the servants.)

If there are picture rails or decorative ledges they're quite good for hiding cable; I think that's where a lot of the lighting cable is on the upper floor of the flat below. I've got quite a lot of speaker cable concealed that way.

At the moment I'm still trying to decide how permanent a network I want; I have three PCs, two desktop and a laptop, but the laptop sits next to the main desktop PC and the other desktop is on the other side of this room. I've got everything on a 10/100 router (with a wireless card for use when I want to use the laptop elsewhere), and am in the throes of trying to persuade the network to talk to an old Xerox laser, which has used the fourth socket on the router.

Eventually I may decide to run cable through to the living room where I keep my home cinema gear and put the other PC there, adding a digital TV receiver card and recording onto hard disk. The other possibility is I'll use the second PC as a dedicated OCR machine, don't want to decide for now since both options would involve spending money I don't currently have on things like a sheet-feed scanner.

Re:

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

well the wired network now extends to three of the four half floors in the flat, so going into the living room or kitchen wouldn't be that hard and might be worth doing at some point as it'll always be better than wireless, but I want to try the power-line Ethernet out again on the same floor to see if it works better. There's very little dado or picture rail left here - most cables go under the carpet!