Home networking project

[Davidmul87]

Hi all,

I'm about to buy my first home (having rented up until now). One thing I've always wanted to do but not been able is to have network cabling installed throughout the property as I use a lot high-def video work and streaming across the network which WiFi just isn't cut out for (in my opinion anyway).

I'm already pretty much sorted on getting the cabling installed but I'm not considering what equipment I should use to run the network.

I currently use a BT Home Hub (only has 1 gigabit port) for my BT Infinity connection which i then connect to various switches to give more ports and run the network throughout the house.

I'm considering however something a bit more high-end. I'm willing to spend but don't want to go crazy.

I would really appreciate if someone might be able to recommend what equipment I should get to run the network? I'm petty new to designing something a bit more robust but any comments very much appreciated.

I'm currently trying to decide:
- Should I get a hardware firewall?
- Is it worth getting a router and then separate access point?
- Anything in particular I should look at for the switch (which may need to be c20 ports to cover all the cables I'll have coming back)?

I had been looking at getting something crazy like a Cisco 1941 router from their business solutions but looks like that might be a bit OTT?

Regards,
David

 

[LokutusofBorg]

First, your LAN and your WAN are separate, so worry about them separately.

Speaking to the LAN side of things, my ideal when we get around to buying a house (we're still renting) will be to have a central wiring closet. The ethernet cable(s) from each room of the house would be a straight run that terminates in the closet at a patch panel. Mount a quality 16/24/32 port switch (unmanaged is fine, unless you have some special need for a managed switch... I don't) on the wall next to the patch panel and use a bunch of .5-/1-/2-foot ethernet cables to connect all the ports on the patch panel to the switch. As far as "wiring your house" that's all you need. Monoprice has good prices on boxes of 1000 feet of Cat6 cable. Buy a box and a bunch of wall jacks/plates and learn how to terminate the cable into the keystone jacks (it isn't hard, but you might want a punch-down tool).

Google this a little bit and you'll see that lots of people have the good idea/recommendation to run multiple cables to each location instead of a single wire. You then terminate them into a 2-port or 4-port wall jack. If you have a room that you know will be your office, then you can make multiple cable runs to different walls of that room to give you more options. But later if you find yourself needing more ethernet ports in any room you can just put a smaller switch in there and run cables around the baseboard or whatever to give you all the ports you need. You can piggyback switches all you want, they don't require special cables (cross-over or whatever) anymore, and these unmanaged switches don't have an uplink port, you just use one of the LAN ports.

Speaking to the WAN side of things, again my ideal will be to have a telephone line, cable coax, fiber line (hoping against hope!), and any other external lines terminate in the closet as well. Your modem and router choice are completely up to you, and will be dictated in part by what your internet service is. All you need to do to connect that set of devices up to your LAN is a single ethernet cable from the LAN port on your router to one of the LAN ports on your large switch. If done right, every ethernet port you've put in the walls around your house will have full LAN as well as Internet access.

Hope that helps.

 

[88keys]

Well there probably are people who are more knowledgable than I regarding the subject, but I've set up 3 home networks in my life and 2 of them were gigabit.

What you need of course depends on your situation. In this case how many devices are going to be on your network.

I can tell you that 99% of home gigabit networks will run just fine (and stream HD video) on consumer grade (unmanaged) gigabit switches with 8-16 ports connected to your typical realtek or broadcom gigabit adapters.

And if that's not good enough, you can buy the Intel brand gigabit NICs for around $30 for an increase in performance or get dual gigabit NIC which start at around $90 for decent quality ones. And I would personally stay away from the cheap ones, except for maybe this Rosewill card if you can find one.

Consumer end routers provide hardware firewalls which are sufficient for most of us.

I honestly don't see much point in just getting an AP unless you happen to already have a higher end router which would have no wifi capabilities.

As far as routers in general go, I would make sure that you get a decent quality router, and just stay away from Belkin lol.

IMO, some good brands to look at are D-Link, Buffalo, and Netgear. Linksys/Cisco is ok, but not my favorite... If you want to have some of the functionalities of a business end router on a lower priced consumer end router then I would suggest that you find one that is compatible with DD-WRT or Tomato. You can find a compatibility list on their respective websites. I know that D-Link firmware is usually well featured, and Buffalo even offers a branded version of DD-WRT for some of their routers.

Another brand that might be worth looking at it is the TP-Link. I've never had one, but the reviews seem good and they seem to offer very competitive prices for their products.

As far as switches go, I've mainly used D-Link, but I also had one Netgear switch that died after about 5 years. The D-Links switches that I've had never failed me. Now, I'm not taking anything away from Netgear because they all served me well. As far as I'm concerned 5 years is a pretty reasonable life expectancy for consumer end electronics.


My setup currently is 7 total network devices. I have 3 on wifi and 4 running wired.

My Ubuntu Test Server and main PC both run that rosewill dual port card that I mentioned earlier and I get between 70-80mbps.

My current NAS (soon to be retired in favor of the Ubuntu server mentioned above) runs the onbaord gigabit adapter and I get speeds around 40-45 mbps. I've heard that the Intel gigabit NICs will get you around 50-55 mbps, but I've never owned one personally so I don't know.
Once the switch to Ubuntu server is completed, I'm going to convert it into a media streamer for streaming video. I originally had CentOS installed and running, but I was having trouble with getting things exactly the way I wanted it so I switched to Ubuntu Server for larger support community because I'm not fluent in Linux.


The other wired device is my keyboard/synthesizer (believe it or not it has an ethernet port). It's mainly used to transfer midi files and voices over so I don't care how fast it goes lol.


The wireless devices are my phone, laptop, printer and PS3.

Back when I lived in my apt, my PS3 was networked via wired gigabit and I was able to stream HD video from my NAS using the same switch/router config that I currently run today. It's also worth mentioning that the PS3 isn't even that good at streaming media, and it's picky as hell when it comes to video formats which is why I'm getting a dedicated media streamer and connecting it to my LAN.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I forgot to answer your specific questions...

- Should I get a hardware firewall?
Any router is inherently a firewall, unless you buy some super cheap piece of junk. If you need advanced features, then you'll know you need something more than a good consumer level router. The Asus RT-N66U is highly recommended around here.

- Is it worth getting a router and then separate access point?
This really depends on the location of your wiring closet. If your wiring closet is centrally located, on the main floor or upstairs, then you should get good wireless coverage putting the wireless router in the wiring closet and using it as your gateway router as well as your wireless AP. However, if your wiring closet is down in the basement, off to a far end of the house, or something similar then you will likely get sub-par wireless coverage using your wireless router as your gateway router because you'll have to put it in the wiring closet. If that's the case (test it) and you have an existing router that's still capable, then I would use your old router as your gateway router (with wireless turned off if it has wireless capability) and then choosing a prime, central location to put your wireless router for maximum coverage throughout the house. Since you're wiring ethernet throughout the house, you could/should be able to ostensibly put it anywhere. If you want to get fancy, and you're up in your attic running wires anyway, you could mount it (upside down) to the ceiling in an upstairs hallway or something.

- Anything in particular I should look at for the switch (which may need to be c20 ports to cover all the cables I'll have coming back)?
I covered this last post... and probably made it obvious I have a clear preference for TrendNet (been using their stuff for years and have had *zero* problems with any of it). Any unmanaged switch will work unless you have special requirements, in which case you probably wouldn't be asking as you'd just know you need higher-end equipment. If all your ethernet runs result in more than 24 ports connected in your patch panel(s), then just use multiple 24-port switches, connected to each other by a single ethernet cable. You should see almost zero impact on LAN performance piggy-backing switches, as I already mentioned. Just make sure you only plug your WAN equipment into *one* of your LAN switches.

Again, hope that helps.

Go read up on some articles on SmallNetBuilder. They have a good series about exactly what you're gearing up to do.

 

[Lithium381]

I forgot to answer your specific questions...

- Should I get a hardware firewall?
Any router is inherently a firewall, unless you buy some super cheap piece of junk. If you need advanced features, then you'll know you need something more than a good consumer level router. The Asus RT-N66U is highly recommended around here.

Not 100% accurate. . . if you buy one advertised as a gateway then that's PROBABLY more accurate, but a router doesn't interently implement security...

- Is it worth getting a router and then separate access point?
This really depends on the location of your wiring closet. If your wiring closet is centrally located, on the main floor or upstairs, then you should get good wireless coverage putting the wireless router in the wiring closet and using it as your gateway router as well as your wireless AP. However, if your wiring closet is down in the basement, off to a far end of the house, or something similar then you will likely get sub-par wireless coverage using your wireless router as your gateway router because you'll have to put it in the wiring closet. If that's the case (test it) and you have an existing router that's still capable, then I would use your old router as your gateway router (with wireless turned off if it has wireless capability) and then choosing a prime, central location to put your wireless router for maximum coverage throughout the house. Since you're wiring ethernet throughout the house, you could/should be able to ostensibly put it anywhere. If you want to get fancy, and you're up in your attic running wires anyway, you could mount it (upside down) to the ceiling in an upstairs hallway or something.

- Anything in particular I should look at for the switch (which may need to be c20 ports to cover all the cables I'll have coming back)?
I covered this last post... and probably made it obvious I have a clear preference for TrendNet (been using their stuff for years and have had *zero* problems with any of it). Any unmanaged switch will work unless you have special requirements, in which case you probably wouldn't be asking as you'd just know you need higher-end equipment. If all your ethernet runs result in more than 24 ports connected in your patch panel(s), then just use multiple 24-port switches, connected to each other by a single ethernet cable. You should see almost zero impact on LAN performance piggy-backing switches, as I already mentioned. Just make sure you only plug your WAN equipment into *one* of your LAN switches.

Again, hope that helps.

Go read up on some articles on SmallNetBuilder. They have a good series about exactly what you're gearing up to do.

Depends on how big your place is and how many ports you need where. I'm planning on putting a seperate 12 port switch in my media center and run just a single cable back to my "office" which will likely have a 24 or 48 port switch.. instead of running 12 jacks up to that location in the front of the hosue . . . .much more flexible!

 

[Cerb]

- Should I get a hardware firewall?

Is that Home Hub not one? What do need in a firewall? The answer will generally lead to a discussion that ends with DD-WRT or Tomato on a cheapish router. In fact, if you're going to end up buying a new router anyway, do not buy one that you can't run Tomato on, whether you end up having a need to run Tomato or not.

Is it worth getting a router and then separate access point?

Only if you can't place the router in a location where it offers a good wireless signal to some other location you need wireless at.

- Anything in particular I should look at for the switch (which may need to be c20 ports to cover all the cables I'll have coming back)?

Not really. Netgear and Trendnet make pretty good low-cost unmanaged switches. Keep in mind that just because you run a cable doesn't mean you have to connect it, yet, so adding more jacks in rooms won't increase the ports you need for a switch, but ill give you more options, and it's easier to go ahead make 3 times as many as you need when you have the tools and are already going to get dirty that day, than later on, when you just need to add one on a wall you hadn't.