[mikhael]

I am fine at creating a small home network, but a friend of mine recently asked me about creating somthing that I am unsure how to do. He wants me to network his (being built) 15000 sq ft house. with 4 dedicated jacks per room.

How I was thinking of doing this is as follows:

a dedicated computer to act as the router and firewall. and a switch with a port dedicated for each room,
then within each room a simple 4 port router that could be baught at any store to create the 4 jacks in each room.

is there any reason to not do it this way? a performance drop maybe?

Edited by mikhael, 18 May 2007 - 04:33 AM.

[Advertisements]

there are reasons not to do EXACTLY what you're wanting to do....mainly the fact that that's a little more hardware than needed...

depending on how many jacks youre talking about...(don't know how many rooms) you should be able to get a rellatively cheep 24 port switch and have all the jacks terminate there...then go from the switch to a router to the modem....you can get routers with pretty solid firewalls...

in my experience...the more hardware you have the more things can go wrong...try to keep it as minimal as possible

[dsenette]

there are reasons not to do EXACTLY what you're wanting to do....mainly the fact that that's a little more hardware than needed...

depending on how many jacks youre talking about...(don't know how many rooms) you should be able to get a rellatively cheep 24 port switch and have all the jacks terminate there...then go from the switch to a router to the modem....you can get routers with pretty solid firewalls...

in my experience...the more hardware you have the more things can go wrong...try to keep it as minimal as possible

[mikhael]

I understand the more hardware the more potential for trouble, but aside from potential troubleshooting dilemmas, would hooking say 24 24 port switches into one 24 port switch in order to achieve 576 ports work? would they all have the ability for full bandwidth?

[Troy]

Is there going to be one computer per jack always being used, or just so that it's always available? This sounds pretty huge-scale!

[dsenette]

I understand the more hardware the more potential for trouble, but aside from potential troubleshooting dilemmas, would hooking say 24 24 port switches into one 24 port switch in order to achieve 576 ports work? would they all have the ability for full bandwidth?

technically yes you could do this...it could get to be pretty funky doing this but yes you could....as long as y our cables aren't longer than 300'...it's always best to run all of them to a central location...that way there's less to track down when there's a problem...

[mikhael]

This is in fact a massive task. You see I am not just hooking up computers to this but a wide variety of IP enabled devices for automating the home. (cameras, audio streaming devices, IP phones, even I/O monitoring devices) as you can see the number of devices needing an (10/100/1000) ethernet backbone.

I included a general network diagram. but it shows only the home run switch. The plan was to have remote switches in secondary locations which would then feed to the primary switch.

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[dsenette]

that looks roughly correct...if you WANT to have switches throughout the house...that's up to you....it sounds like you'll have more connections than i assumed you would in a home...you might want to put a switch in each room with a CAT run back to the main switch where the server/modem/router will be....but don't put more than one router in the house if you can avoid it hehe it can cause "issues"....

are you planning on going full gigabit here or just 10/100?

[dsenette]

oh...and the best question what's your budget? and can i borrow some money?

[mikhael]

mostly 10/100 very few items on gigabit. and yes my plan was one router, with a switch in each room. i just wanted to make sure it would work. also not my budget. its for a friends house. hehe so i get to play with his money

[dsenette]

ok well see if you can squeeze some extra cash out of him for me....call it a "consulting fee" heheh

yeah....a multitude of switches throughout the place would work well....if at all possible...keep the number of devices to the bare minimum needed to accomplish the task