Things as they stand now

O'kay, so it's been a while since I've posted anything. Worse since phase one as been live for a while now. Life keeps getting in the way.

Here's where everything stands:

I took the Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt that was acting as wireless bridge out of my room and put it in the living room to give a desktop that was moved upstairs from the office a connection. In it's place I put the Netgear GS608, which currently has 7 of 8 ports in use. It's kind of funny that I was advised to just run one drop per room and use a 5 port switch in each room, yet on the one 8 port I've already gotten I'm one port away from being full. The guy that suggested it to me, though, had no idea the amount of hardware I'm running in each room, so I forgive him.

The Linksys WRT54g that was in my son's room along with the cable modem, and primary server were moved down into the basement office. This not only reduces physical access to the equipment, so it'll be more obvious if my son is trying to get around his internet access restrictions, but also puts the equipment in a location which stays cooler all year round. It also has the added benefit of reducing the temp in my son's room by a degree or two. He likes it cold, so he's happier.

That required pulling a new coax line for the modem. I currently have all ports on the WRT54g in use with two rooms, the server, and a workstation in the office. Pulling cat5e to other rooms in the house, as well as second lines to some rooms, will most likely just wait until I can get another switch. It'll be hard to motivate myself to start pulling lines, and drilling holes, when I won't be able to make the jacks live right away. Besides once I start pulling lines I'm going to want to wall fish the stuff I already have pulled at the same time, and I haven't decided on the vendor I want to use for the modular jacks yet, or if I want to put phone and coax in the same boxes.

In my son's room, taking the place of the WRT54g, is an old SMC 5608DS 10/100 hub. Four of those ports are currently in use. He has another device to connect, but it currently doesn't have an ethernet jack. I need to find another USB-ethernet adaptor. I've got one, that's damaged, which I need to repackage. Just want to get another, preferably of the same model, and repack it as well. Main reason I want the same model is that I know that model will do what I need. We'll see if I can find another, preferably cheap.

I'm not sure how I want to progress next. I have at least two more rooms to pull cat5e to, and I might pull more than one line to at least some rooms. Before I can make use of any new lines, though, I have to acquire another switch. That also brings up the question of passing NAT off to the server and using the WRT54g as just an access point... then there's wall fishing what I already have pulled.

As an aside, after moving the server things went very wrong. About every 10 minutes or so the machine kept panicing and restarting. No apparent reason. Fortunately just weeks earlier I had been given another old machine, which actually had a slightly faster CPU (an AMD K6/2 450MHz instead of the K6/2 400), so I pulled out the HD and dropped it in the newer machine along with the NIC, and all was right with the world once more.

I think next still will probably be getting another switch... we'll see.