Although I'm a software developer, I am not so familiar with
networking technologies, and I would like a sanity check on this
before I purchase anything:
In my living room now, I have cable internet coming into a Motorola
Surfboard cable modem, and out of that into a Linksys WRT54G wireless/
4 port router. All is fine. I want to keep the wireless on this level
of the house.
However, in the basement, the last owner installed a small hub with
ethernet going into 8 rooms (nice!). I want to purchase a new switch
(8 or 16 port), install it in the basement with all the ethernet lines
branching out from there.
Question 1: What would be an appropriate switch here? I like Linksys,
and the basement setup is a rack mount system. Not sure which model to
buy.
Question 2: Can I simply run an ethernet cable up from on of the ports
on this new switch to my WRT54G upstairs?
run the cables:
Modem to router to switch to individual device (computer)
You can also add anotherWireless Access Point (AP) at any of your 8
wired locations if your wireless range needs better coverage.
Any Linksys rack mount 10/100 switch should be fine for your
residential application. No need to spend a lot of money. I've bought
a few reconditioned, but get the 16 port if you do. I've had
individual ports die, so I just plug into another.
On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:53:59 -0000, DeanB <deanbrown3d@yahoo.com>
wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>Although I'm a software developer, I am not so familiar with
>networking technologies, and I would like a sanity check on this
>before I purchase anything:
>
>In my living room now, I have cable internet coming into a Motorola
>Surfboard cable modem, and out of that into a Linksys WRT54G wireless/
>4 port router. All is fine. I want to keep the wireless on this level
>of the house.
>
>However, in the basement, the last owner installed a small hub with
>ethernet going into 8 rooms (nice!). I want to purchase a new switch
>(8 or 16 port), install it in the basement with all the ethernet lines
>branching out from there.
>
>Question 1: What would be an appropriate switch here? I like Linksys,
>and the basement setup is a rack mount system. Not sure which model to
>buy.
>
>Question 2: Can I simply run an ethernet cable up from on of the ports
>on this new switch to my WRT54G upstairs?
>
>Thanks immensely!
>
>Dean
On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:53:59 -0000, DeanB <deanbrown3d@yahoo.com>
wrote:
>Question 1: What would be an appropriate switch here? I like Linksys,
>and the basement setup is a rack mount system. Not sure which model to
>buy.
Doesn't really matter much. I needed to do something like this a few
months ago, and the only rack mount "consumer level" gear I could find
in local stores was Netgear. I thought it was overpriced, and ended up
getting a SynOptics switch from a company which I used to do business
with, that was surplus to their needs.
>Question 2: Can I simply run an ethernet cable up from on of the ports
>on this new switch to my WRT54G upstairs?
A better description would be running an Ethernet cable DOWN from a
LAN port on the router to the switch <grin>. There should be at least
one port on the switch that can either be Normal or Uplink. You want
to use it in Uplink mode. The "mode switch" may be manual or
automatic, depending on the sophistication of the particular switch
you get.
John Jones, Detroit
On Sep 6, 6:08 am, John Jones <jjetroit...@ameritech.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:53:59 -0000, DeanB <deanbrow...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> >Question 1: What would be an appropriate switch here? I like Linksys,
> >and the basement setup is a rack mount system. Not sure which model to
> >buy.
>
> Doesn't really matter much. I needed to do something like this a few
> months ago, and the only rack mount "consumer level" gear I could find
> in local stores was Netgear. I thought it was overpriced, and ended up
> getting a SynOptics switch from a company which I used to do business
> with, that was surplus to their needs.
>
> >Question 2: Can I simply run an ethernet cable up from on of the ports
> >on this new switch to my WRT54G upstairs?
>
> A better description would be running an Ethernet cable DOWN from a
> LAN port on the router to the switch <grin>. There should be at least
> one port on the switch that can either be Normal or Uplink. You want
> to use it in Uplink mode. The "mode switch" may be manual or
> automatic, depending on the sophistication of the particular switch
> you get.
> John Jones, Detroit
Thanks John, Alan.
Are you saying that only a router can connect directly to a modem's
ethernet port, and a switch cannot do this?
On Sep 6, 10:30 am, DeanB <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Sep 6, 6:08 am, John Jones <jjetroit...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:53:59 -0000, DeanB <deanbrow...@yahoo.com>
> > wrote:
>
> > >Question 1: What would be an appropriate switch here? I like Linksys,
> > >and the basement setup is a rack mount system. Not sure which model to
> > >buy.
>
> > Doesn't really matter much. I needed to do something like this a few
> > months ago, and the only rack mount "consumer level" gear I could find
> > in local stores was Netgear. I thought it was overpriced, and ended up
> > getting a SynOptics switch from a company which I used to do business
> > with, that was surplus to their needs.
>
> > >Question 2: Can I simply run an ethernet cable up from on of the ports
> > >on this new switch to my WRT54G upstairs?
>
> > A better description would be running an Ethernet cable DOWN from a
> > LAN port on the router to the switch <grin>. There should be at least
> > one port on the switch that can either be Normal or Uplink. You want
> > to use it in Uplink mode. The "mode switch" may be manual or
> > automatic, depending on the sophistication of the particular switch
> > you get.
> > John Jones, Detroit
>
> Thanks John, Alan.
>
> Are you saying that only a router can connect directly to a modem's
> ethernet port, and a switch cannot do this?- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
>Although I'm a software developer, I am not so familiar with
>networking technologies, and I would like a sanity check on this
>before I purchase anything:
Wireless has been known to cause insanity. Or, perhaps one needs to
be insane to get involved in wireless. My brain is too far gone to
decide which is true.
>In my living room now, I have cable internet coming into a Motorola
>Surfboard cable modem, and out of that into a Linksys WRT54G wireless/
>4 port router. All is fine. I want to keep the wireless on this level
>of the house.
>
>However, in the basement, the last owner installed a small hub with
>ethernet going into 8 rooms (nice!). I want to purchase a new switch
>(8 or 16 port), install it in the basement with all the ethernet lines
>branching out from there.
Check your cabling. Does it say CAT5 or CAT5e on the cable jacket? If
not, you may have a performance or data corruption problem. The small
hub might be 10baseT (10 Mbit/sec) only, which means that the previous
owner may have been cheap and used CAT3 cable. That's fine for
10Mbits/sec but will not work at 100BaseT or gigabit.
>Question 1: What would be an appropriate switch here? I like Linksys,
>and the basement setup is a rack mount system. Not sure which model to
>buy.
I hate to admit to random behavior (a sure sign of insanity), but I
tend to use whatever switch I can find. Sometimes, it's the cheap
piece of junk that the big box store has on sale. Other times, it's
some surplus rack mounted managed (SNMP) devices that I picked up
cheap on eBay. I don't recall ever making an attempt to optimize my
switch purchase by any feature other than price.
The major features that should be considered are:
1. Number of ports (there's never enough)
2. Speed. Do you need or want gigabit? I would because it seems
that almost everything these daze is going gigabit ethernet.
3. Management. Do you plan to monitor or control traffic with SNMP?
If so, you need a "managed" switch. I don't think you need this.
4. VLAN. Are you planning to seperate broadcast domains? With a
system as small as yours, probably not.
Rack mounting is nice, but not really necessary for a small switch. I
have 4 racks in my house, which function as storage than as an
equipment mounting. For small odd size boxes, I have several shelves
full of junk. Works well.
I guess I do have a favored ethernet rack mounted switch. Netgear
FS524 (24 port 100/10base-T). About $45 including shipping used on
eBay. Make sure you get the weird looking rack ears. The bad news is
that it has a small fan inside, which might be a problem if you don't
like noise. It also doesn't do gigabit ethernet or SNMP management.
However, it is cheap.
>Question 2: Can I simply run an ethernet cable up from on of the ports
>on this new switch to my WRT54G upstairs?
Yep. You can daisy chain ethernet switches until you hit some timing
limit (at about 1500 ft end to end). Each segment must also be less
than 300ft. You can't do that with ethernet hubs. Also, there are
many types of "ethernet cable". Methinks CAT5e is what you want.
Drivel: I was bored one day and needed some entertainment. So, I dug
out a mess of ethernet crossover cables, and ran them between adjacent
ethernet ports on a pile of 3ea 24 port ethernet switches. I think
there were about 30 patch cables involved. It worked just fine and I
had no problem browsing the network through that mess. I guess that
means you can daisy chain at least 32 ethernet switches.
On Sep 6, 10:30 am, DeanB <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Sep 6, 6:08 am, John Jones <jjetroit...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:53:59 -0000, DeanB <deanbrow...@yahoo.com>
> > wrote:
>
> > >Question 1: What would be an appropriate switch here? I like Linksys,
> > >and the basement setup is a rack mount system. Not sure which model to
> > >buy.
>
> > Doesn't really matter much. I needed to do something like this a few
> > months ago, and the only rack mount "consumer level" gear I could find
> > in local stores was Netgear. I thought it was overpriced, and ended up
> > getting a SynOptics switch from a company which I used to do business
> > with, that was surplus to their needs.
>
> > >Question 2: Can I simply run an ethernet cable up from on of the ports
> > >on this new switch to my WRT54G upstairs?
>
> > A better description would be running an Ethernet cable DOWN from a
> > LAN port on the router to the switch <grin>. There should be at least
> > one port on the switch that can either be Normal or Uplink. You want
> > to use it in Uplink mode. The "mode switch" may be manual or
> > automatic, depending on the sophistication of the particular switch
> > you get.
> > John Jones, Detroit
>
> Thanks John, Alan.
>
> Are you saying that only a router can connect directly to a modem's
> ethernet port, and a switch cannot do this?
Methinks you need to refresh on IP. :')
That'd make it crystal clear wrt IP what the differences are between
switching and routing. A modem per-se has no IP address; rather, a
network interface does.
OTOH interfaces connected to a switch can communicate at "layer 2"
with other such interfaces, with it implicit that their IPs are on
the
"same subnet".
Lots of other considerations, e.g. how local host interfaces get their
IP,
how the cable-connected interface gets its IP. Hint: totally
independent,
and thus totally non-interoperable on the LAN that is a set of switch
ports.
On Sep 6, 1:53 pm, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> DeanB <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> hath wroth:
>
> >Although I'm a software developer, I am not so familiar with
> >networking technologies, and I would like a sanity check on this
> >before I purchase anything:
>
> Wireless has been known to cause insanity. Or, perhaps one needs to
> be insane to get involved in wireless. My brain is too far gone to
> decide which is true.
>
> >In my living room now, I have cable internet coming into a Motorola
> >Surfboard cable modem, and out of that into a Linksys WRT54G wireless/
> >4 port router. All is fine. I want to keep the wireless on this level
> >of the house.
>
> >However, in the basement, the last owner installed a small hub with
> >ethernet going into 8 rooms (nice!). I want to purchase a new switch
> >(8 or 16 port), install it in the basement with all the ethernet lines
> >branching out from there.
>
> Check your cabling. Does it say CAT5 or CAT5e on the cable jacket? If
> not, you may have a performance or data corruption problem. The small
> hub might be 10baseT (10 Mbit/sec) only, which means that the previous
> owner may have been cheap and used CAT3 cable. That's fine for
> 10Mbits/sec but will not work at 100BaseT or gigabit.
>
> >Question 1: What would be an appropriate switch here? I like Linksys,
> >and the basement setup is a rack mount system. Not sure which model to
> >buy.
>
> I hate to admit to random behavior (a sure sign of insanity), but I
> tend to use whatever switch I can find. Sometimes, it's the cheap
> piece of junk that the big box store has on sale. Other times, it's
> some surplus rack mounted managed (SNMP) devices that I picked up
> cheap on eBay. I don't recall ever making an attempt to optimize my
> switch purchase by any feature other than price.
>
> The major features that should be considered are:
> 1. Number of ports (there's never enough)
> 2. Speed. Do you need or want gigabit? I would because it seems
> that almost everything these daze is going gigabit ethernet.
> 3. Management. Do you plan to monitor or control traffic with SNMP?
> If so, you need a "managed" switch. I don't think you need this.
> 4. VLAN. Are you planning to seperate broadcast domains? With a
> system as small as yours, probably not.
>
> Rack mounting is nice, but not really necessary for a small switch. I
> have 4 racks in my house, which function as storage than as an
> equipment mounting. For small odd size boxes, I have several shelves
> full of junk. Works well.
>
> I guess I do have a favored ethernet rack mounted switch. Netgear
> FS524 (24 port 100/10base-T). About $45 including shipping used on
> eBay. Make sure you get the weird looking rack ears. The bad news is
> that it has a small fan inside, which might be a problem if you don't
> like noise. It also doesn't do gigabit ethernet or SNMP management.
> However, it is cheap.
>
> >Question 2: Can I simply run an ethernet cable up from on of the ports
> >on this new switch to my WRT54G upstairs?
>
> Yep. You can daisy chain ethernet switches until you hit some timing
> limit (at about 1500 ft end to end). Each segment must also be less
> than 300ft. You can't do that with ethernet hubs. Also, there are
> many types of "ethernet cable". Methinks CAT5e is what you want.
>
> Drivel: I was bored one day and needed some entertainment. So, I dug
> out a mess of ethernet crossover cables, and ran them between adjacent
> ethernet ports on a pile of 3ea 24 port ethernet switches. I think
> there were about 30 patch cables involved. It worked just fine and I
> had no problem browsing the network through that mess. I guess that
> means you can daisy chain at least 32 ethernet switches.
>
> --
> Jeff Liebermann je...@cruzio.com
> 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
> Santa Cruz CA 95060http://802.11junk.com
> Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Thanks for that! I didn't even consider a used switch, I will look
into it though.
Unfortunately the FS524 does not have PoE. I'm going to set up cameras
that use this, so that I don't need to run power cables up to them.
>Thanks for that! I didn't even consider a used switch, I will look
>into it though.
It's not like just after the dot.bomb meltdown, when I could pickup
used switches at the local recyclers by the pound, but they're still
quite available.
>Unfortunately the FS524 does not have PoE. I'm going to set up cameras
>that use this, so that I don't need to run power cables up to them.
Well, try a Netgear FS116PNA 16 port 802.11af ethernet switch for
about $200+. I don't know how many cameras you're considering, but
only 8 ports on this switch do PoE. If you only plan on one or two
cameras, you also might find it cheaper just to use PoE adapters.
Ummm... Incidentally, your questions have nothing to do with wireless
internet.
On Sep 6, 5:41 pm, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> DeanB <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> hath wroth:
>
> >Thanks for that! I didn't even consider a used switch, I will look
> >into it though.
>
> It's not like just after the dot.bomb meltdown, when I could pickup
> used switches at the local recyclers by the pound, but they're still
> quite available.
>
> >Unfortunately the FS524 does not have PoE. I'm going to set up cameras
> >that use this, so that I don't need to run power cables up to them.
>
> Well, try a Netgear FS116PNA 16 port 802.11af ethernet switch for
> about $200+. I don't know how many cameras you're considering, but
> only 8 ports on this switch do PoE. If you only plan on one or two
> cameras, you also might find it cheaper just to use PoE adapters.
>
> Ummm... Incidentally, your questions have nothing to do with wireless
> internet.
>
> --
> Jeff Liebermann je...@cruzio.com
> 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
> Santa Cruz CA 95060http://802.11junk.com
> Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
It has everything to do with wireless! I am fixing up wireless cameras
and need a decent storage and archival backbone:) I lookaed at the
FS116PNA and it looks pretty good. Thanks for all the help.
>It has everything to do with wireless! I am fixing up wireless cameras
>and need a decent storage and archival backbone:) I lookaed at the
>FS116PNA and it looks pretty good. Thanks for all the help.
I hate to be a PITA, but why do you need PoE for wireless cameras?
Only wired cameras use PoE. Were you planning on using wireless power
to run the cameras? If so, rectifying the few milliwatts produced by
the WRT54G is not going to run the pilot light, much less the whole
camera. Also NAS (network attached storage) drives don't use PoE as
they require much more horsepower. So, what are you going to run with
PoE?
On Sep 7, 10:25 am, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> DeanB <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> hath wroth:
>
> >It has everything to do with wireless! I am fixing up wireless cameras
> >and need a decent storage and archival backbone:) I lookaed at the
> >FS116PNA and it looks pretty good. Thanks for all the help.
>
> I hate to be a PITA, but why do you need PoE for wireless cameras?
> Only wired cameras use PoE. Were you planning on using wireless power
> to run the cameras? If so, rectifying the few milliwatts produced by
> the WRT54G is not going to run the pilot light, much less the whole
> camera. Also NAS (network attached storage) drives don't use PoE as
> they require much more horsepower. So, what are you going to run with
> PoE?
>
> --
> Jeff Liebermann je...@cruzio.com
> 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
> Santa Cruz CA 95060http://802.11junk.com
> Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Ok I'm sorry for the confusion - I want to wire some cameras on the
ethernet and use PoE to simplifiy the installation. For some other
cameras, where I don't have a convenient ethernet jack, I want to use
wireless.
Basic question on house ethernet design 
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