Second day

Ok, so yesterday I was able to finish pulling wire into the master bedroom and into my office. See below for a picture of one of the awesome holes I put in the wall:



That hole is in my office under my desk. I also took a picture of what it looks like when I'm punching down the cable into the keystone jacks that pop into the face plate that covers that hole:

 

Ok, after I finished punching down the wires in each room it was time to tackle the other end of the wires, which were all sticking through a hole in the ceiling of my office closet:

 

Yes, that is a rag that I stuffed into the hole to stop the insulation from falling down from the attic. In hindsight, it may have been better to run the cables through a hole in the wall rather than the ceiling, but hey -- what's done is done and the rag is stopping the continual flow of insulation pretty well. I had to trim the wires a lot (we ran several feet extra on each run just in case) and then I started punching each one into the patch panel. Don't ask me exactly what the advantage of the patch panel is, other than it is a nice tidy place to end all of these long wires. That's really all it does as far as I can tell. Here is a picture of the back of the patch panel after I punched down all of the wires:

 

You might notice that there is a gap in the middle of the wires. I had allocated space to drop four (4) wires into the guest bedroom (aka Lilly's new library) but she covered all of the walls with bookcases and we didn't want to move them to drop wires. We still might add them in the future though, so I left the space in my panel. Next, I mounted the patch panel and the switch into a rack (this is a musician's rack, not a server rack that you would normally use, but it was WAY cheaper and works the same). I used short one (1) foot patch cables to patch each port from the patch panel to the switch. The switch is where the real magic happens. This is a picture of the switch and the patch panel mounted:

 

So, to summarize, the "internet" comes from Comcast and comes in through the wall and runs via coaxial cable into the closet:



You can see that I ran that cable along the ceiling and I intend to paint it to match the wall. Once the coaxial reaches the closet, it attaches to the modem that converts the cable signal to a signal that travels on ethernet cable. In the next picture the modem is on the bottom right. Then the modem attaches to a router (bottom left) which then attaches to the switch. The switch attaches to each cable that is running through the wall (via the patch panel) and distributes internet signal equally throughout the house.



Whew. I finished all of that around 10pm last night. I still need to get the three wireless routers up and running -- that's coming next!