Adam & Amber’s Blog

We here in Minnesota are in the midst of a freak snowstorm. This isn’t unheard of, and in fact Rochester usually registers a few inches of snow in April. Getting an April snowstorm is, however, big news. So big that we made the national news Check out the link below to see our humble little city on msnbc.

Link to msnbc video

Note: The msn video player is funky and I just kinda guessed at a good way to link to it, so if this doesn’t work let me know.

After this weekend I am complete with Step 1 of my MythTV Project. On Saturday Jon, Andy, and Jim came over and helped me get the upstairs wired up for ethernet. This is not a glamorous part of the process but it allowed me to add a very small amount of value to the house and make it much easier to hook everything up later. I also took this opportunity to upgrade our wireless router to hopefully help our connection issues.

The Supplies

Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router
SMC SMCGS8 Gigabit Switch
cat5e Cable
Faceplates with two ethernet and one coax ports

The Work

There are a few goals for this project:

1. Wire the living room and two bedrooms each with 2 ethernet ports.
2. Move the Cable Modem and Router up to the living room to help signal strength and resetability
3. Install a switch to serve internet and provide a high speed network to the living room and bedrooms

The original thought was that we could easily replace all of the coax jacks by attaching a string to the coax cable, pulling them down, attaching the two cat5 cables and pulling them back up. A perfect plan, unfortunately I failed to study my basement well enough to realize that all the coax cable is routed up through one location and run around the house on the main floor. This meant that we would instead have to do it the hard way, by drilling a hole in the floor and using a couple hangers to pull up the cables. Keep in mind that there are all external walls and so we had to do all of this through the wall insulation. On top of all this we had to route all the cables through the floor which involved lots of drilling and grumbling by Andy.

In the end it took us about 3 hours to get it all done and more importantly gave me my invented reason to put in the order for the MythTV Components which I will spend much more time on soon.