Running Ethernet Throughout My House
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The current networking situation in my house looks like this:
As you can see, there is a 40 Mbps bottleneck due to the Power-line transceivers being on separate circuits. The reason I have to use Power-line at all is because Wi-Fi signals from the garage don’t reach the living room. We originally used the AT&T Wi-Fi extenders, but they were unreliable and high-latency. For my family, Power-line has been good enough since 40 Mbps is enough to stream Netflix and the low latency means websites load faster. For me, it’s been very annoying whenever I do large file transfers to my server or other high-bandwidth activities.
That is why I’m going to run Ethernet throughout my house. The only problem is that my parents won’t let me go into the attic or the crawlspace so I’ll have to run it along the walls and ceiling instead.
I had to drill a hole to run a cable downstairs to the garage.
Hole in sidewall of staircase:
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From there, I ran the cable down the staircase to the AT&T gateway.
Cable running downstairs:
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At the top of the staircase, I ran the cable towards the living room, alongside cables from my desktop, laptop, and the wireless router.
Cable from garage meeting with other cables:
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All the cables meet at my server rack and feed into my switch. For now, my server rack is more of a shelf than a rack because I don’t own any rack-mount servers, but that’ll hopefully change in the future.
Server rack:
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My network looks like this now:
In the future, I plan to set up VLANs and firewalls to segment my network and prevent access to my servers from the wireless devices on the network. I also want to set up IPv6 and make my website available over IPv6. I’m also thinking about migrating all my services to Proxmox VMs so that I can cluster my servers together and achieve High Availability. In light of the recent cybersecurity incidents (Black October) I also plan to have most of the services that only I use (e.g. Navidrome, DokuWiki) accessible only by VPN in order to reduce my attack surface. Services my friends rely on me for will still stay public (e.g. XMPP).