Recently in MyNetworkCupboard Category

In the beginning of 2012, I completed a DIY project to wire up my house with ethernet cable that gave me grand schemes for the things I wanted to do inside my house with computers; Networked Attached Storage, a multi-media PC, replace the home phone with Asterisk, etc... The list is virtually endless. One of the things high up on that list was to put some sort of network printing in there. We hardly ever print documents but when we do it is a minor hassle. The PC that shares the printer is never on or the sharing is being fussy For some time, I have wanted to bypass all that hassle by attaching the printer to the network.

The Pre-existing Condition

My path to attaching the printer to the network has been blocked for quite a while by my old printer. Like lots of consumers, when I bought this printer I did not really put much thought into what I really needed a printer for. To my chagrin, I wound up picking an inkjet printer with an integrated scanner. I thought I was being wise when I picked a printer that had multiple cartridges (black, yellow, blue, red) because I knew the majority of the printing I would need to do would be in black and white. I wanted something with a separate black cartridge so that I could just keep printing in black & white if the color ran out. Unfortunately for me, the printer that I chose would complain and refuse to print at all if it determined that any of the cartridges was empty or defective. Given the nature of inkjet cartridges drying up, I basically was never really able to print when I wanted to. In the two or so years I have owned this printer, I would be absolutely shocked if I ever got more than 20-30 pages out of a set of cartridges. When you consider that a set of cartridges cost roughly $65 to replace, clearly I had made a poor decision in the purchase of this printer.

Choosing a New Printer

A couple weeks ago, I started shopping for a new printer. Because of how rarely we print, price was important. I needed something economical, network capable, reliable and it absolutely could not have ink cartridges. Based on my prior experience I wound up deciding that a laser printer was probably best for us.

Color or Black and White

Ever since the first injket printer, color printers have been readily available with a low up-front cost. But what advantages do you really get of owning a color printer of any sort? Is that set of driving directions from Google Maps really all that more useful in color? Is the recipe you found on the Internet easier to prepare because it is in color? As far as I can think, the answer is "No" except for one regard: the printing of pictures. However, with services like Shutterfly, Snapfish and the digital printing available at your local retailers, you can get a much better quality print at a lower cost than if you did it yourself on your printer.

Built-in Network Connectivity vs. Print Server

The second decision I had to contemplate was whether to purchase a printer with integrated network capability or to pick some sort of Print Server. I have been tinkering with and looking at prices of computer components for decades. The last time I looked at a print server they were still pretty expensive so initially my search began with printers that had on-board ethernet. I was surprised at the number printers that had onboard Ethernet but the starting price was a little higher than I had in mind, so I went back and looked at print servers.

Interestingly enough, print servers are cheap compared to what I remember. Starting around $25-$30, you can get a USB 2.0 print server. I dug around both Newegg and Amazon reading scores of reviews on about a half dozen different print servers.

Decision

I wound up deciding on getting the TL-PS310U made by TP-Link as my print server (specs) from Amazon for about $36. For my printer, I decided to go with the Brother HL2230 (specs) which I found on sale at Newegg for $64. The price and footprint wound up being the deciding factors on my purchase of the printer.

Setup

Setting everything up was pretty simple. The print server showed up a day early. Using my OpenWRT router, I assigned a preferred IP for the DHCP to assign to the Printer Server. The printer server came with some management software that I loaded up to make it dummy-proof. Once I had installed the printer server's software, I was able to hook up the printer and Windows 7 automatically pulled down drivers. The only wrinkle that I ran into is that the print server had a "disconnect from Printer if idle for 30 seconds" option that made installing the printer's drivers difficult. I had to disable that option in order to get the drivers installed. The print server also hosts a small Web UI that you can hit in a browser.

Regrets

These regrets are pretty minor but I thought I'd point them out for anyone who was interested. The web interface on the TL-PS310U print server was terribly slow, it seemed to be lacking some of the features available in the management software and it does not load up correctly in Chrome which caused me to have open it up in a different browser. In my case my alternate browser is Internet Explorer and I die a little bit on the inside each time I have to open Internet Explorer. My other "complaint" isn't really directed at anything in general except for maybe the electrical system in my house. Every time the printer warms up, I get an almost imperceptible flicker in the lights and both of the computers in the den receive and display complaints from their UPSes about the power blip. Laser printers have always drawn a ton of power when they first come online; I shouldn't have been so surprised about the drop in power across the circuit in my den.

Conclusion

Having never really tinkered with or messed with a network-attached printer aside from muttering profanities at the various printers I have had to use at my various jobs, this was relatively painless. Especially when you consider that I went the ultra low-budget route. For roughly $100, I wound up getting a printer and hooking it up to my network without any issues so far on any of the PCs in our house. I am pretty confident that the toner in this printer isn't going to need replacing in a couple of months even if it goes completely neglected. If you're looking for an easy way to share a USB printer, I recommend this TL-PS310U print server.

What We Did

In the end we wound cabling 6 rooms in total; the laundry room where the cupboard is located, the den/office, each of the three bedrooms and the living room. We built out a miniature 19" rack in an empty cupboard and on that rack we installed; a 48 port patch panel that I purchased cheaply from eBay, two 8 port Netgear Gigabit switches, and we relocated the Verizon FiOS modem inside the cupboard. Built into the cupboard is room for some future growth. Two of the ports on the Netgear switches are empty, three of the 10/100 ports on the Verizon FiOS modem are open and there are literally dozens of empty ports on the patch panel.

With this project, there was a little bit of "design-on-the-fly", as I scaled things back a bit. I pared down the number of rooms to cable by deciding not to run cable in to the other rooms in the house. The more work I did cabling rooms, the more I realized that myself and future owners of the house would never have any need for a data connection in those rooms. We didn't just pare down though, we wound up building a much more robust and functional "rack" inside the cupboard than I had originally planned. Plus, we wound up solving a sloppy installation by Verizon when we relocated the FiOS modem.

Things I Liked

• I did not fall through the ceiling: At the forefront of my mind the entire time I was up in the attic, I felt that it was inevitable that I would put at best my foot through the ceiling in one of the rooms I was cabling. It was not quite a paralyzing fear, but it certainly caused me to sweat a little more profusely when navigating the attic.
• My WiFi coverage problems are fixed: The entire motivation behind this project was to find a way to move my WiFi access point from one corner of the house into the middle of the house. Once I had decided to cable up one room for data, I wanted to go ahead and drop cables in the other frequently used (and computed in) rooms of the house. Before, the master bedroom had very poor WiFi coverage, and now the signal is strong enough to make it to all of the rooms in the house.
• It was much easier than I anticipated: If you were a veteran do-it-yourselfer, I would not blame you for scoffing at any of my articles. I admit that I am at best a novice with these kinds of projects. On the off hand that you do not have much experience working with tools, I think something to this degree is an excellent project to learn on..
• Inexpensive: For a long time, cost containment was my primary concern. I had ballparked out prices when I was considering all my different options but I feared that those costs would escalate a little bit as the project progressed. Thankfully, that did not happen. All told, I estimate that I spent about $350 on parts, and the bulk of that was on the network equipment. It also helped that a good friend donated a spool of CAT5e, so if you're planning on doing a similar project budget in another 50-65 dollars for the cable.
• I had lots of help: I will dig into this a little more later, but I had a great amount of help; help from friends completing the project, support from my wife, offers from friends who had tools to loan and finally no shortage of helpful advice from coworkers who had cabled up real networks.

Things I Didn't Like

• Tool-less RJ45 keystones: When I was shopping around for RJ45 keystones, I wound up finding these a bit cheaper than traditional RJ45 keystones. Since I needed so many of them, I thought it made sense to try and save money. I assume that they are cheaper because they were not made as well, but it is just as likely that we did not use them quite correctly. At any rate, we wound up spending time punching down a few of the network jacks a couple times. I would have gladly traded a few dollars for not having to spend the time re-doing the jacks several times.
• Insulation: I am not sure if you are all aware of this, but insulation is everywhere up in attics. It gets in the way and it is a bit of a nuisance. I wished on a numerous times that I had a basement or a crawl space that would have allowed me to work up from below. I had bought a mask at Home Depot to stop from breathing the insulation when I spent considerable time up there, but in the "chilly" attic all I wound up doing was fogging up my glasses every time I exhaled.
• Having to hire a professional: This is mostly prideful of me, but I really wanted to say that we were able to do this all on our own. I have no regrets about breaking down and hiring someone to help us out; I was at the point where we were going to spend hours what it took the professional to do, or scrap wiring up two of the rooms. It was a bit of a shot to the ego, but I am pleased with the results.
• Building the rack compactly: The cupboard was just barely deep enough and narrow enough that when we measured and built the rack, we packed as much equipment into as small a space as possible. This made punching down the cables on certain ports of the patch panel quite difficult. Combine that with the business end of the mounting screws poking out the bottom of the pegboard and you have yourself the proverbial knuckle buster.

What I'd do Differently

For the most part, I am pretty regret-free on the project; the finished product turned out really well. But given the chance to do it all over again I would make a couple changes. Firstly, I would have moved the FiOS modem as the first step. We wound up having a hard time mounting the modem to the pegboard at the very end because the cupboard was getting pretty full by the time we finished the project. Secondly, the rack we built should have been built a little wider to spread out the pieces of the pegboard from the patch panel by another fraction of an inch. Lastly, I would have been a bit less vigorous in cutting a hole in the wall for the junction box on the one jack behind the TV I did punch through the other side of the wall.

Acknowledgements

I would not have been able to do this without the help of two people. Firstly, my darling wife basically gave me a blank check in completing the project, both in regards to the purchase of tools and equipment, and then she wound up being infinitely patient the past couple months on the days we spent working on it. I'm not sure that I would be able to exhibit the same patience in her shoes. Secondly, many thanks should be expressed to my friend Pat. Pat donated all of the CAT5e cable that now snakes throughout the house. Additionally, Pat was an extra set of hands and even more importantly an extra brain. Without Pat's help, the project would have been much smaller and not nearly as brag-worthy as it turned out. I would probably still be up in the attic today tangled up in loose cable and in danger of falling through the ceiling. I look forward to buying Pat some more pizza and helping him with the upcoming projects at his own home.

Final Thoughts

This was a fun, inexpensive, and simple (yet challenging) project to do on our own. Even if you do not own a lot of tools, the necessary tools are relatively inexpensive. Originally, I set out to move the WiFi access point to a more centralized location. That wound up expanding to also wiring up all of the rooms where computing might happen. I am pretty certain that this investment of sweat equity has added some value to our home, and more importantly, the functionality of the network is going to enable me to do interesting things like streaming video over the network. All things considered, this project was a success in my books. For those of you unhappy with the WiFi coverage in your houses, wanting a faster, more stable connection for gaming consoles, interested in streaming high-quality video to your televisions, or interested in turning a spare bedroom into an office then I would recommend starting a similar project of your own.

After my last blog entry things seemed pretty bleak. I had a sneaking suspicion that if I had decided to try and push too far that I would wind up putting a sizable Brian-shaped hole in one or more of the bedrooms we were trying to wire up. On the other hand, it felt pretty hollow not being able to wire up a working network jack in each of the house's three bedrooms. At this point, we felt like we really had two options: buy about 13 feet worth of flexible drill bits and extensions, hire someone to help us, or risk falling through the ceiling. At first, it seemed like the flexible drill bits was the route to go. We made a couple trips to the local big-box hardware stores and got a little bit of a sticker shock when we priced out the tools needed to drill the hole we were planning. Being a first time home buyer, I have been slowly buying all sorts of tools that I did not own before but I just could not justify spending so much on a tool I would likely never use again.

Thankfully, Mother Nature decided to help nudge me in the right direction in the form of a torrential downpour. A week or so ago, we got roughly 5 inches of rain in roughly 48 hours. That rain crept its way into my house via a leak in the roof (or two). Since then, we have had a revolving door of roofers, masons and handymen in our house looking at the leaks. We had hired a local handyman to repair a cracked 2x4" in the attic which happened to be right next to Mr. Impassible HVAC unit. In conversation, I had explained to him about the project and about how I had not had the gumption to try and work my way over. The sprightly man some 15-20 years my senior quite literally hopped, skipped and jumped over to the wall we wanted to run our cables down into. With his assistance, we ran two cables down in no time at all. Not only did he do this in about one fifth the time it would have taken the two of us, but his total bill (including other items around the house) was less than just buying the flexible drill bits we had been considering the week prior. If it had not been such a huge relief to have these cables run and to do it in a somewhat of an affordable fashion, I would have been knocked down a peg or two that this sprightly gray-haired gentleman had so easily completed something that I could not. There is something to be said about how invaluable experience truly is when accomplishing tasks like these.

That weekend, we also ran the cable for behind the TV, the entire purpose of this project from day one. Having a network jack behind the TV would enable me to move the wireless access point to the center of the rooms that would need it the most. This last network jack was completed with the first "oops" of the entire project. Our living room is paneled with wood, and the paneling is nailed down onto regular drywall. We started off trying to saw the hole for the electrical box with the drywall saw, but sawing through the paneling was quite a bit of work, and someone who shall remain nameless most vigorously pushed the drywall saw straight through both what we were cutting and then also the drywall behind it. As far as accidents go, it was not a bad one. Nothing a touch of glue or Spackle couldn't fix. Having finally completed this network drop, I immediately moved our wireless access point to just behind the TV. I will blog about this in more detail, but I am quite happy to report that the WiFi coverage problems we were having on the east side of the house have been solved.

The weekend of the Superbowl, we decided to finish the remaining bits of work to relocate the Verizon FiOS modem, neaten up the cupboard and clean up all the messes we made along the way.

Ever since the Verizon technician had installed the FiOS, I had been unhappy with the installation. Mostly because they drilled into the house on the east side, pushed their cables (network & coax) through then fed that cable through the attic and drilled out the west side of the attic, routed the cable down the exterior wall of the house and then drilled back into the room we used for our office. It's a messy installation, and involved drilling 3 holes in the outside of the house. When we started planning My Network Cupboard, I thought it would be icing on the cake to fix this convoluted installation. We unhooked the modem, disassembled the network jack that Verizon had installed and pulled the cable on the western side of our house back into the attic.

What we did next was a little fancy, but we had plenty of open space on the patch panel to use it. The modem had both a coaxial cable and an Ethernet cable plugged into it. We fished both those cables down into the cupboard. We mounted the modem onto the pegboard next to the routers and hooked up the coaxial cable to the modem. The ethernet cable we punched down to an empty port on the patch panel, and then punched down 5 additional ports for the ports on the modem (1xWAN, 4xSwitched). I do not have any immediate plans for the three unused switch ports, but it's nice to have them wired into the network cupboard in case they're needed.

We created some patch cords and patched the Verizon FiOS back into the rest of the network that had been completed already. We tested some throughput on various devices and made sure that the FiOS TV was fully functional. For all intents and purposes we had completed wiring the network.

We spent the next couple hours doing wrap up tasks. I had bought a gigantic spool of velcro, which we cut into thin strips and used to do some cable management in the cupboard. We also hooked up the second magnetic clasp on the cupboard due to the fact that just one magnetic clasp was not enough to hold the cupboard shut all the time. We fed all the remaining slack back up into the attic and up in the attic we used more velcro to manage the loose cable and hold it in place. I gathered up my trusty planks that I had spent so much time on and redistributed the insulation.

I took some pictures and even a short video, but I am saving that for my last blog about the project where I'll talk about the cost (both time and money), lessons learned and advice I would like to pass along to others thinking about a similar project at their own homes.

For those of you that follow my Twitter feed and those of you who live within a block or so of my house, then you already know that we have had a pretty difficult day in the MyNetworkCupboard effort two weeks ago.

Our goals were pretty simple: cable up the patch panel, test the existing cable runs, run the network drops to the remaining rooms, and relocate the Verizon FiOS router. From what we had accomplished the night before, I thought it was a slam-dunk that we would have the project wrapped up in a few hours and then be eating burgers and drinking beers. In retrospect, it is funny how wrong your assumptions can be about the work that is immediately before you.

We started off by measuring out and crimping down network cables for the patch panel. To be meticulous, we tested each cable we created. Our intent was to wire up the patch panel to such an extent that we could plug in the existing runs and do some throughput testing.

Upon completing the cable cutting, the wheels on our project began wobbling. We attempted to move the FiOS hardware into the cupboard. The FiOS router/modem has both a coaxial cable and an Ethernet cable run into it from the Verizon box on the side of the house. In our research online, we'd read that it needs one or the other, not necessarily both. To test things out, we powered off the FiOS router and disconnected the coaxial cable. With only the Ethernet plugged in, we were not able to access any of the Video-on-Demand services that we get with Verizon's FiOS TV services. We were hoping that it would work with just Ethernet, but that was not the case. For the last step of project reroute both the coaxial cable and Ethernet cable fed into the FiOS router.

The wheels continued to wobble when we noticed during our throughput testing that on roughly half of the drops (8) we were only getting 100Mb and in some cases 10Mb from our runs. When we initially ran each of the drops, we put a cable tester and made sure that each jack lit up on all 8 strands so this came as a bit of surprise. What we found, was that the tool-less RJ45 keystone jacks we had been using were either a little fragile or that we were being careless with them after crimping them down. We had to fix and re-test several of the network jacks before they lit up the lights on the switches that we expected and measured out at gigabit speeds.

The next part of the project was a little fun and kind of humorous. Our house is a ranch style house and we have a two-sided fireplace right in the middle of the house. The fireplace separates the office/den and living room, the network cupboard is in the laundry room that is attached to the office/den, and the living room has vaulted ceilings. Getting the cable from one side of the house past the chimney, over the vaulted ceiling and within arm's reach of the other attic access point was going to take some creativity, luck and athleticism; basically we needed Tim Tebow up in the attic with us. Although, I'm not sure Tebow would fit comfortably in the attic or that his awkward left-handed throwing motion would be conducive to making the throw at all.

I purchased a ball of very lightweight but sturdy twine and grabbed one of my puppy's bone-shaped dog toys. I tied the twine to the toy and Pat held one end while I threw the toy, trying to thread a needle across the room near the roof. Twenty or thirty tries later, I finally hit the hole that I was aiming for, but the dog toy was going to be out of our reach from the other side of the attic. However, the dog toy snagged when I tried to pull it back and rather than risk losing one of the puppy's favorite toys, I decided to go up into the other side of the attic and try and retrieve it somehow. From the other side of the attic, the toy was out of reach and out of sight, though we could see the twine hanging down across a round HVAC duct. But it's resting place was going to be too small and cramped to crawl into.

Thankfully we had an 8 to 10 foot length of 1"x2" leftover from building the framing and equipment rack. Pat went down into the garage and rummaged around and managed to turn it into a hook of sorts with one of the clamps I we had been using. Thankfully, it was barely long enough that I could lean forward and snag the loose twine and retrieve the dog toy on the end.

The plan after that was to use the string to pull through the network cable to the other attic access point and to attach a new stretch of twine to the network cable we pulled through; that way we would have enough twine to pull cables back and forth between the two sides of the house. We pulled the first cable across without too much difficulty and then we ran into the Immovable Object.

The master bedroom, spare bedroom #1, spare bedroom #2 and guest bathroom are in a row through the hall. The hall is nearly intersected by the doorway to the living room with the attic access in that hallway. Up in the attic, the HVAC unit runs along the wall between the bedrooms and the hallway. HVAC ducting extends towards the front of the house to spare bedroom #2, towards the back of the house to the Master bedroom and then hangs off the back of the unit.

In order to run network cable into the two remaining bedrooms (spare bedroom #2 was already wired up with CAT5e by a previous owner), I was going to have to find a way over the HVAC unit, or the main trunk and then over another smaller HVAC duct. I raked away as much of loose insulation as I could and was dismayed to find that the rafters were running 90 degrees differently than they were over the office/den. The rafters were running parallel to the HVAC unit and there was only one rafter between HVAC & Main Trunk and the next run of HVAC ducting. Being a man of limited mobility and coordination, I had no faith that I would be able to climb over two obstacles, place my boards and move to drill holes down and run cables through them. To make matters worse, the roof slopes down three sides of the master bedroom; even if I could navigate safely past the HVAC obstacles being able to worm into the master bedroom and run a cable down the far wall was a very, very unlikely proposition. With that, the wheels finally shot off on the weekend's progress and any promise of completing the project that weekend was lost.

By the time we finished that Saturday night (very very late), it turned out to be a very frustrating and disappointing day. At one point I was afraid that we would not be able to complete my goal of cabling every room but the kitchen and bathrooms with Ethernet. However, there are always alternatives, and I have been thinking about it for two weeks now; right now I'm trying to decide how feasible it would be to use a flexible drill bit (and some flexible extensions) to try and drill up into the attic and then fish the cable back down. Unfortunately, buying all of those tools is going to cost quite a few dollars. Since I am a new home owner, I'm not opposed to buying most tools, since they will likely come in handy down the road on another project. In this case, though, I'm hesitant to buy the tools because it's going to wind up being something I only use this one time. We will see what kind of zany/creative/expensive solution we can come up with!