I noticed that within 30-45 minutes there were 5 or 6 posts to micheal's request for info on cat 5 cabling.
I know this is a technical user group, but it surprised me that so many people responded so quick and it got me wondering... How "wired" are all of our houses? I know a lot of us do cabling or have done it as a job, but I'm talking about at home. For instance, at my house I have an open closet in my office where I try to terminate everything. This closet has a box for cable and phone termination with conduit running through the ceiling to the attic. It also has a home made rack system. Behind the rack is a 12 port Leviton Quickport plate that has power for the satellite switch in the attic, cable coming in for the modem, phone going out to the punch down block in the box, and various ports for network distribution. I went to a resturant supply house and bought a 24"x36"x70" wire/post shelf system with four shelves and locking casters (much cheaper than the same shelf system labeled for a server room). It makes a pretty good make-shift rack for home. There is enough room for eight mini/mid towers on two shelves, the top shelf is for storage and the cable modem and one shelf has the power strips and monitor. I put a 2200 APC UPS on the floor to the side of the rack, ran a dedicated 20A circuit into the closet for the UPS, and fed the rack power strips off of the UPS. I went to Home Depot and bought some flat, angle, and tube aluminum and made various mounts for my switches and KVM and hung them under the shelves using fender washers and carriage bolts. Granted there are no fancy races for the cabling but velcro strips and zip-ties work great to keep it neat. Every room in the house has at least one network connection (not to mention the wireless which covers the entire house - haven't found a dead spot yet). The wiring closet was in the wrong part of the house for the wireless to work correctly so I moved the wireless router to the living room entertainment center and put the antenna in the attic. All of our DVDs are being ripped to a server which is accessed via media PCs through out the house. When it came time to put the one in the master bedroom, the noise was pretty annoying at night so I'm now running more twisted pair for remote IR and AV over Cat 5 so I can move the satellite box and media pc into the wiring closet. The installation looked so tidy with nothing but a TV in the room that the project's been expanded to move the equipment out of the spare bedroom also. There are satellite, cable and phone drops behind the tvs in the living room, master beedroom, spare bedroom, and my office. Am I weird or does everyone do these kinds of things :-) James
