Some Like It Connected
March 16th, 2010 by ComputerBob
This is another one of my many do-it-yourself adventures, joining such classics as Some Like It Hot and Some Like It Warm and Some Like It Soft.
Regular readers of this Journal know that I’ve found a lot of great local deals on Craigslist.com.
Those deals, and others like them, have allowed me to virtually replace (pun intended) nearly all of my older PC equipment with much newer, faster (but still used) equipment; and to set up my home office network with two client computers, a heavy-duty, high-speed, networked laser printer, a flatbed scanner, and a separate PC-based file server.
Another result of all of my wheeling and dealing is that I now have a lot of PC equipment to sell — with possibly more on the way next week, depending on whether or not I have the winning bids on several pieces of equipment that I bid on in a nearby city’s sealed-bid auction.
But my wife doesn’t want potential buyers (AKA strangers) coming into our home to look at that PC equipment, so, with equipment piling up in my garage, I’ve been planning to do the following:
- Carry the “for sale” equipment from my garage to my home office.
- Set up the “for sale” equipment in my home office, where I have a networked Internet connection.
- Carry the “for sale” equipment back to the garage, to show it to strangers.
- Hope that people will be willing to buy my “for sale” equipment without seeing it connected to the Internet.
As you can see, the lack of an Internet connection in my garage has forced me to carry a lot of equipment back and forth between my garage and my home office. But one piece of equipment took an especially heavy toll on me: A Compaq Proliant enterprise server that I got from a local auction that weighs almost 80 pounds.
So, several weeks ago, I made up my mind that I was going to run an ethernet cable from my home office to my garage, to allow me to keep all of my “for sale” equipment in my garage, where I could not only set it all up, but also demonstate its Internet connectivity to potential buyers. Both ends of that new ethernet cable would have a Cat5e ethernet jack, and I would use a short ethernet patch cable to connect the jack in my home office to one of the ports of my DSL modem/router.
My goals were to make the entire cable as invisible as possible, and to run it without drilling any holes in my home’s outer cinder block walls.
I did a lot of online research on ethernet wiring, to make sure that I understood how to do it, as well as any potential problems to avoid, like making sure that the new cable would be at least one foot away from all of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling of my garage.
In preparation for the job, last week, I bought 100 feet of Cat5e ethernet cable from a local woman on Craigslist for only $10.
Then, a few days ago, I went to Home Depot and bought two wall-mount connection boxes, two face plates for those boxes, two Leviton Quickport Cat5e ethernet jacks, and a six-foot length of plastic channel, to hide and protect the ethernet cable as it runs from my garage’s ceiling to my garage’s new connector box on the wall. I also bought something else that all of my planning and measuring made me realize was going to be absolutely essential to be able to do the job: a 50-foot fish tape.
To make a very long, very exhausting story short(er), it took me all day yesterday to run the ethernet cable up the inside wall of my garage into the garage’s attic; all the way across the garage’s attic to the inside-right corner; all the way the length of the garage (while avoiding the fluorescent lights to the outside-right corner; out the garage’s side soffit; into the front porch’s soffit, across the entire front porch’s soffit; up into the home office’s soffit; into the home office’s attic; through the ceiling of the home office’s right closet; and through a new hole that I drilled between the two closets, into the home office’s left closet.
Then today, it took me all day to:
- Secure the ethernet cable around the frame of the left closet’s double-doors.
- Secure it down and out the bottom-left corner of the left closet.
- Secure it halfway around the room to the home office’s new connection box, behind my desk.
- Wire the ethernet jack in the garage.
- Wire the ethernet jack in my home office.
- Carry the Compaq server out to the garage, set it all up, and test the new ethernet connection. I was relieved to see that the garage’s new ethernet connection runs at exactly the same speed as the ethernet connections that are in my home office.
I had never wired a Cat5e ethernet jack before, and I was really nervous about doing it, but it turned out to be relatively easy, since each of the Cat5e jacks that I bought come with their own punch down tool.
And I did it extremely meticulously, because I didn’t want to run into the nightmare of having to try to troubleshoot the whole job if my new ethernet connection didn’t work.
When it was all done, the new ethernet connection worked perfectly, and I had achieved both of my goals: The entire cable is completely hidden except in my home office, where, if you look carefully, you’ll see that it is anchored to the very bottom of the baseboards of two walls, just barely above the carpeting. And I did the entire job without drilling any holes in my home’s cinder block walls.
Par for the course whenever I complete such a major project, I was very sore and completely exhausted afterward, so I took an hour-long nap before I even started to put away my tools and clean up my garage and home office.
Now that my garage is on the Internet, that corner will be my new “equipment for sale” area, and I’ll find new places to store all of the home and auto-repair stuff that I used to store there.
Update, March 25, 2010: This morning, I finished building two new shelves to hold the PC equipment that I’ll be putting up for sale. The new shelves are nearly twice as deep much stronger than the shelves shown above. They’re also carefully spaced to leave enough room for the servers to fit underneath, while still allowing free access to my home’s main breaker box.
I used two heavy duty wooden pallets that I got for free from a local woman on Craigslist, along with one 10-foot treated 2×4 and some masonry screws, wood screws and L-brackets that I bought at Home Depot.
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