Self-made LAN in My New House

Sandro Groganz

Roughly one week ago, me and my wife moved to our newly built house. I made sure that almost all rooms have two ethernet plugs. Actually, I set up the whole LAN infrastructure myself – which I am really proud of.

There are duplex Cat7 cables from almost every room going down to the basement where I reserved a little room (about 2.5 square meeters) for the servers rack (Triton). We have an external Wireless Access Point (Linksys) which I will turn on once the weather is good enough to sit on the terrace.

Here’s a picture of me connecting the cables with the patch panel (Telegärtner, some of the best ones on the market), using an LSA plus tool:

Connecting cables with patch panel using LSA tool

This picture shows the bottom of the server rack, where I mounted the patch panels and the Linksys switch:

Patch panels and switch

Here’s the whole baby, including one Linux file server, one server with Windows for communication and media (phone, fax, least cost router, UPnP), plus one NAS as backup storage device and a 4-port KVM switch (Trendnet TK-400K, works well for a good price) to rule them all via one monitor, keyboard and mouse:

Server rack

You bet that the server room got finished first 🙂

3 thoughts on “Self-made LAN in My New House”

  1. That’s geekery, isn’t it 😉 Take a project requirement – “I need Internet at home for my home office and casual surfing” – and turn it into project by itself. Interesting that you could do it despite the women-acceptance-factor – or is she a geek, too?

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  2. I did almost nothing myself for the new house (no time), except for the LAN. The LAN was something to show off to the craftsmen and have them respect me as someone who roughly understands what they are talking about 🙂

    Woman-acceptance-factor is a critical point of course. My wife is not a geek, not at all. She uses the Internet heavily for her job though (she’s a teacher). She did not mind the infrastructure in general, but she was a bit surprised about all the machines when she saw the result.

    Also: while moving from software development to marketing in my professional career, I heard the geek in me screeming for some technical work. So, ok, yes, I agree, it’s geekery 🙂

    Thanks for your comment! You see, it made me think.

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  3. Pingback: Our New House (by Sandro Groganz)

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