Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["David R. Matusiak" <matusiak AT hotmail.com>]

well,

if you're really serious about this home network, you should look into 
having two or more OC3's dropped to the house. i'd go with a decent provider 
like sprint or cable & wireless. i'd also avoid uunet like the plague - 
consider them the micro$oft of networking (unless your into that whole 
'world domination/mind control' thing). you'll need the redundancy to assure 
high bandwidth at all times. plus, next time we are all snowed in, you will 
be guaranteed fast responses to this list.

from there, i would use some cisc^H^H^H^H nortel edge routers to handle 
those OC3's. you definitely want fiber at this point. you would also want 
strong ACL's in place to limit the amount of snoops on your network. the 
traffic should pass to internal routers; perhaps of the nortel or cabletron 
ilk. i would not use bay networks equipment - from all reports i've heard, 
they have actual gremlins in them that come out to eat your cabling - not 
good for achieving the five nines of uptime.

the internal routers can be room specific or latitude/longitude specific. to 
save cash, you could go with _only_ one internal router and use secure VLANs 
to corral off each network segment. this is wise because then guests in the 
guest room cannot gain access to your kitchen network, or even worse, your 
master bedroom network. if you went with the one router solution, you would 
most likely need to add several cards to achieve maximum port capacity.

i would also become concerned about application level security at this 
point. for all sensitive systems, it would be best to firewall them 
individually or, better yet, turn them off completely and unplug them. 
whichever room would be serving your mission critical data would most 
certainly need a load balancing solution. the alteon switching method is 
fair to mild, with F5's BigIP machines edging them out in performance only 
marginally. you can do 'round-robin' load balancing at the router level, but 
for quality assurance, it is always better to add another highly complex 
point of failure to the mix.

this proposal will not touch on the internal machine serving your data 
because i'm sure your in-house IT people will have that under control. oh 
wait... your question. cabling?

yeah, cat5, cat6, whatever it takes.

the only sensible alternative to this is a G4 ti book with airport.
sDSL recommended. check your local listings. prices may vary. whatever you 
do, do NOT accept the contractual stipulation that they are required to eat 
your food while installing your hardware. this is a clause from decades ago 
that should have been phased out by now. i had to learn this one the hard 
way. i was out four microwave pizzas, a country ham and several bags of 
doritos when the Rhythms techs set up camp here for a week.

otherwise, best of luck.
dave m. ;)

From: Gina Norman <gina AT vnet.net>
To: "InterNetWorkers" <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: [internetworkers] silly cable question
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 09:54:28 -0400 (EDT)

I'm adding onto my house (new master bedroom and bath) and I'm getting the
builder to pull speaker wire as part of the job, so I can use my speaker
set "B" in the bedroom.  It has occurred to me that as long as he's
pulling wire anyway, he might as well pull the sorts of wire that would be
useful in setting up a home network.  Notice the vagueness of that last
bit -- that's the root of my problem.

I'm a website mgr. sort-of-girl and have (almost no) idea what the
hardware end of the world looks like beyond some basic concepts I have
loosely attached to the word "server."

The word CAT5 is in my head, but I don't know:

1) if that's really what I need
2) where I could get such a thing (need fewer than 70 ft. and would
prefer not to buy tons more than I need)
3) if there's something else I'll need along with the CAT5.

The computers themselves are, at this point, hypothetical.  My home PC is
an ancient coal-fired Mac, so when I want to work from home I take in my
laptop.  I've thought about getting an older windows-type machine because
I'm really interested in X-10ing my house.  I would expect that the cable
might be used to connect my laptop in the bedroom to my X-10 machine in
the living room.

Any ideas/thoughts?

Any help would be appreciated!

-gina


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