Home Network

On Monday, my main computer lost its internet connection. I'm a cable modem customer, and the cable enters in the den on the bottom floor. My main computer is in a spare bedroom upstairs, and it isn't very convenient to connect it via wiring, so I setup a wireless network which has worked fine most of the time. Every once in a while the signal will drop and I'll lose access for a bit, but it usually comes back quickly.

This time was different. On Tuesday, still nothing. Fortunately I have a few other computers and wasn't completely cut off. I decided to troubleshoot a bit and got out my long ethernet cable, ran it from my router up the stairs as far as it would reach, to a switch that was also as far as it would reach, which connected another cable to my computer. Presto, back online, so this told my everything was fine with the computer and network interface.

I took my notebook upstairs and noted the wireless signal wasn't very good. Both the link quality and signal strength were "poor". So I bought a higher gain antenna and set that up. It helped, as my notebook read the link quality and signal strength as "fair" to "good", but my office system was still offline. Thus, I suspect my wireless bridge died. Later, I checked it on another computer, and it does seem to be dead.

While looking for a replacement wireless bridge, I decided to check out some of the newer 802.11g equipment, since they support longer ranges. I found the Netgear WGT634U wireless storage router, which looked great. Actually, even better as this router can accept a USB disk and make it available on the network. This is extremely convenient, as I just bought a 200 GB USB/FireWire drive!

Using that new router, I can put all my pictures, music, and files on the network drive and get to it from any computer. Well, that can already happen but is a bit more work to setup, hanging a drive off a computer instead of the router.

Anyway, this router has a bigger range than my current one, but that is moot, as I also decided to go ahead and wire the upstairs rooms. Two of the bedrooms share a wall with my garage, so by simply drilling through the wall, I can run a cable from those room into the garage, which gets me at least 80% of the way to the router. The last few feet from the garage to the den will be done by more punching through, or perhaps using the door to the house. I have a friend at work who is experienced in cabling and minor work like this, so he'll help me do it.

After this change, all my systems will be wired, and wireless will be only for computers that actually move around - primarily notebooks/laptops.