Closeup

For the past seven days or so we’ve had an Ethernet cable running from Alex’s room, down the laundry chute, and over to the Xbox. That was clearly a temporary situation, and this Sunday was phase 1 of the DeJardin data center. I’m having WAY too much fun doing this for some reason.

The first thing that had to change was the location of the cable modem and wireless router. There’s no reason for it to be in Alex’s room, especially since there’s only one thing in there that needs network. The back of the Comcast device has several of the hole-and-slot hangers so it was easy to hang securely from a stud on a pair of screws. The wireless router I was thinking of mounting above the cable modem, but it has no native way of securing it. Then I saw some of that two-sided foam tape in the utility room. Problem solved – now the two devices are one with a very short Ethernet cable linking them.

Data PBX and power

I’m very happy how cable management turned out. Since it’s in the basement now I strung it all up in the rafters. The power supply I had available also had mounting slots on it, so I put it on the stud off the floor. This also made for a great location for the Trixbox Asterisk PBX server I’d installed recently. It’s on an ancient PC (400MHz 128Mb) that only needs power and network.

Phase 2 should be even more fun. If I can get my hands on a Sipura 3000 or similar device it’s going to be time to rewire all of the phones; at the moment they’re as bad as you would expect in a hundred year old house. So the first step there will be to get a patch panel where the snarl comes together, cut all the wires, punch them down, and see what’s coming from where. Depending on how close that turns out I might take a look at getting some more telephony hardware to have each room in the house have a dedicated extension.

Phase 3 is probably even less likely… But… It sure would be nice if we could pull some cat-5 through the house and get voice/data jacks in each bedroom and the living room. Even if we won’t be in this house forever that aught to be a nice selling point. Fully wired you know? Or maybe it’s just me.