November 1st, 2006
When the house burnt down in April 2006, it was a catastrophe. Fortunately we were very well insured and the house has been rebuilt and we financially didn’t loose anything and I had the opportunity to create a real network. Real network for me means 54G wireless, Fiber vertical cabling and Cat6 horizontal cabling.
Some call me crazy but as all the walls were open, I installed 1” orange tubing network around the house.
I got a new office, that was a kid’s bedroom on the main floor and I used the closet as a technical room. I’d enough space to place a 7’ rack and I could bring tubing from the top and bottom of the closet behind the rack. Each room receives at least 2 conduits with a special sub-closet for the kitchen/earth room area where 5 tubes are running from. The basement, not finished for now but has already a sub-closet.
Crazy may be but now each room is equipped with fiber, GiGE, cable and receive enough 54G wireless to watch a movie.
Posted in Home Networking | No Comments »
October 31st, 2006
We have an account with Vonage – 4 lines. We switched one line to Vonage some 3 years ago to try it, we added a fax line and then switched the 2 remaining lines last year.
Vonage first quality is cost. We have a total monthly cost around $90 with long distance and very low cost international, compared to the $35 per line we were paying previously with out long distance. That’s already a neat savings.
The overall phone quality is very good even for long distance and international. Vonage is not a low cost/low-quality provider like Net2phone and others. In fact I even can say that the quality is equivalent to land lines.
Vonage is using VoIP as transport but the end user is a standard phone, not a VoIP one and this makes a big difference as you can’t directly connect your Vonage account into a VoIP router, switch or server. You need a POTS interface which can be costly. I haven’t found any Vonage interface or setup to connect directly from Vonage to an Asterisk server. We used a small PBX from BBS telecom with 4 IVT10 and 2 IVT16, very nice equipment without voicemail but all the features of a big one.
My next generation of hone phone system will be full VoIP based on an Asterisk system.
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October 30th, 2006
My first Home network was based on a Microsoft Small Business Server, dual CPU, 2 GB Memory, dual NIC card and two 75 Gig Hard Drives. Very sweet machine, always running, no crashes, one of the most reliable appliances in the house.
Behind the server I had a 24 Ethernet ports 10/100Mb HP switch to distribute to a network printer, 3 PCs, 2 laptops and a wireless ‘extender’. In front of the Server I had a cable modem connected to a firewall with the 1st NAT layer and 4 Vonage VoIP interfaces.
The wiring was made of good plain Cat5 cables.
Everything worked well but the wireless network. The box I had didn’t offer IP pass-through as an option so it had its own NAT and it was impossible then to logon onto the server! I never resolved that problem entirely.
Microsoft Small Business Server is quite an expensive tool for a home ($1,500 for 10 seats) but it offers all the features to make life easier: exchange server, file sharing, printer sharing, fax sharing, access control (great for kids), powerful firewall, internal website, media server etc…
Bottom line, I was very pleased with my home network!
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October 29th, 2006
Five, six years ago I implemented an X10 network mainly by replacing the existing switches, outlets by X10 ones, adding lamp and appliances modules and installing an X10 software on my computer.
It was a quite easy task even if and because the house was quite old - built in 1957 and expanded in the early 70s. The fuse panel system was quite confusing with a total of 3 in different rooms, a 25amps fuse for a mix of switches and outlets in different rooms etc…
Several problems occurred mainly due to the age of the electrical installation:
- Noisy electrical lines, this problem was partially resolved with numerous filters.
- Phase coupling issues as the previous owners ran cables without real considerations. This problem was solved with couplers.
- Loss of signal on the line, resolved with repeaters.
- Lack of real control because my switches and modules were mainly one way.
Nevertheless, we enjoyed it even if few lights were going on or off just by themselves.
Posted in Home Automation | No Comments »
October 29th, 2006
I decided to create a blog to talk about my Home Automation, network and VoIP Systems. I had those one already based on older technologies and when the house burnt down, I had to redo it based on past experience and new technologies.
Feel free to comment and to ask, I’ll be pleased helping around.
Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »