Home Network Setup

[bigkov]

Greetings,

My wife and and I moving into a new house next year and i'm trying to make some plans for the network layout.

Essentially i want to run clean setup from the basement panel out to the rest of the house – we will have Cat 5e ports in most of the rooms (3 bedroom, office and living room).

In the office on second floor, i would like to connect my Mac Pro and Xbox 360 and possibly a Time Capsule.

The living room where we are considering getting an AppleTV or similar device (Mac mini?) to play downloaded content on our home theatre.

Bedroom ports are just for convenience and future connectivity.

Currently i have a Dlink 655 wireless router with the modem in the office and the Mac Pro and Xbox connected directly. Our two laptops connect via wireless.

My questions are - would it be better to connect a switch to the router in the basement which everything connects to and in the office i could connect a Time Capsule as an access point to extend the wireless range as well as connect Mac Pro and Xbox to the LAN ports on the TC or would that yield poor performance?

Or would it be better to connect a switch to the port in the office where i could connect the MP, Xbox to lan and TC as an access point – thus sacrificing one of the bedroom ports since the dlink router in the basement only has 4 ports.

If anyone could give me some advice on setting this up, that would be great.

 

[bigkov]

wow, really? no one?

 

[cwa107]

My house has all CAT 5e cabling to all rooms, terminating in a Leviton panel in the basement in a box. In that box is a 6-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. A patch runs to my router, which is wall-mounted high in the stairwell to the basement (so it's actually at the first floor, mounted high up and central within my house). That router is a DIR-655 like yours. My cable modem is mounted right next to the patch panel enclosure.

This set up works quite well in my 2 story 2300 square foot home.

I don't think you need anything more than a switch in your patch panel enclosure. Then, you can patch into your router wherever you decide to place it.

The worst case scenario would be to have your wireless router in the basement. So, anything you can do to avoid that would be optimal.

 

[bobtomay]

If you want to run LAN ports to 5 rooms, you already need the switch in the basement as the 655 only has 4 ports. Should be no question of where the switch belongs.

Then use the TC in the office in bridge mode with all other devices there being attached to it, but the 655 still acting as the DHCP server.

I do this already, with the same equipment, though no need of a switch (yet). Modem and 655 sit in my office and the TC sits at the opposite end of the house in the family room by the entertainment center and HTPC. I actually run two wireless networks. One on the 655 that is combo 'g/n' mainly for the PS3 and another on the TC is 'n' only for my Macs. Also gives me expanded coverage to the stronger of the two networks when moving about the house with the notebooks.

 

[cwa107]

BTW, this is the patch panel I have and would highly recommend it. Particularly if your cable also terminates in that box.

Leviton Advanced Home Phone and Video Unit - Structured Cabling Panels - Leviton 47603-AHT - LevitonProducts.com

 

[bigkov]

thank you both for the replies.

@cwa107 - would it not be better to run the dlink router before the switch so all connections are firewalled?

@bobtomay - i like the sound of this, i was hoping to be able to run two wireless networks or use the TC as an extra access point.

so safe to say i can run the configuration like this?:

basement: modem-->dlink router-->switch-->2nd floor: TimeCap--> MacPro, Xbox

and wireless clients can connect to either dlink or TC.