Quick house LAN check please!

Chris1712 · 27 Jun 2008 at 16:14

OK guys im moving into my new uni accomodation next week and the landlord is letting me sort the network equipment.

The cablings already laid throughout the house and theres a whopping 13 rooms to serve. Its Cat5e.

Heres my first, incredibly detailed layout idea.

Make sense to anyone else? It should work as far as i can tell, will be using dd-wrt on the router for QoS and need gigabit between the main pc's as we serve tv etc. throughout the house.

Comments?

EDIT: The big black lines is meant to be the house, 4 rooms on 3 floors.

spm_uk · 27 Jun 2008 at 16:57

hope you are getting a 20meg line with that many rooms atleast. also you can get cheap student rates on virgin media if you didnt know

Rob7865 · 27 Jun 2008 at 17:53

Personally I'd put in 1 x 24 port Managed 10/100/1000 switch, and not bother with the 2 netgears. With the managed switch you can then seperate the upper and lower floors with VLANs, plus VLAN any other services (VOIP, IPTV ect). You will also then beable to set QoS on a Port basis.

Just my 2pence!
Rob

Sp00n · 27 Jun 2008 at 18:09

Single unmanaged switch with some breed of firewall for QoS, done.

/edit i see you have a wrt54g with i am assuming tomato/ddwrt, just get a single switch and don't scrimp on it.

Chris1712 · 27 Jun 2008 at 22:11

Unfortunately the cable layout calls for 2 switches. The top floor ports all go to one loom and then a single cable goes downstairs. Thats the red one in the diagram

.

I've gone for the wrt54g exactly for tomato/dd-wrt, any recommendations on that? I've read a bit about dd-wrt and it seems the cleverer of the two, with tomato a bit more friendly.
QoS by MAC address is about the most complicated thing ill be using it for, mayb bandwidth limiting also.

Cheers, Chris.

EDIT: And yes it will be 20mb, with an upgrade to 50mb as soon as its available. We have 20mb at the moment shared between 5 and probably download ~500gb a month lol. Student discount you say? How do i wangle that?

EDIT 2: Are there any decent cheap line tester type things worth getting? So i can easily work out which cable goes to which room?

R.O.S.S.I · 28 Jun 2008 at 08:16

The diagram you've laid out should work from looking at it. Can't see why it wouldn't.

How do you not know which cable goes to which room?

Sp00n · 28 Jun 2008 at 12:41

Chris1712 said:
Unfortunately the cable layout calls for 2 switches. The top floor ports all go to one loom and then a single cable goes downstairs. Thats the red one in the diagram .

I've gone for the wrt54g exactly for tomato/dd-wrt, any recommendations on that? I've read a bit about dd-wrt and it seems the cleverer of the two, with tomato a bit more friendly.
QoS by MAC address is about the most complicated thing ill be using it for, mayb bandwidth limiting also.

Cheers, Chris.

EDIT: And yes it will be 20mb, with an upgrade to 50mb as soon as its available. We have 20mb at the moment shared between 5 and probably download ~500gb a month lol. Student discount you say? How do i wangle that?

EDIT 2: Are there any decent cheap line tester type things worth getting? So i can easily work out which cable goes to which room?

Your local electrical store will sell a cat5 testing kit for very little.

I use DDWRT and I couldn't recommend it enough!