Backyard Fiber Update 1
- Intro and Backstory
- Install Day One (you are here)
- It's Done (ish?)
Today is day one of three installation days. Yesterday they came and dug the trenches and today they're starting to put in the electrical and gas for the generator.
Tomorrow and possibly the next day are for actually hooking everything up.
When that's all taken care of I'll still be waiting on FS.com to build and ship the fiber assemblies that will go in the conduits.
Sigh.
At least I can finalize some other decisions while I wait for other people to do their thing.
Office Setup
Amongst all of the weird things that the previous owners of this house did, one of the very weirdest was running two ethernet drops from the tiny cabinet in the office (pic in the previous part of this series), all the way across the garage, and into a room that they used as a den/study area and we use as a playroom for the kids.
Why two? No idea. Why the tiny cabinet? I guess it made sense at the time.
I've been wanting to recify this setup since we've owned the house and I finally have my chance with these conduits, so I'm taking it.
The new setup will be:
- All of the fiber from the media cabinet in the house and the shed runs to a structured media panel in the office
- Cat6 from this new panel to various points around the office: TV, guest room, my spouse's studio, my desk and work bench, and of course the stupid little cabinet
- A Brocade ICX 7150-C12P managed switch in the panel
There are two candidates for where to put the panel. Candidate 1 is a closet in the guest bedroom that we currently just use for random storage.
Candidate 2 is the utility room
The closet has the advantages of being an entirely empty stud cavity with lots of room to put other stuff if I choose. It's also approxmiately in the center of the building which might make it better for wireless stuff.
The utility room is the more natural choice because the junction box on the outside will be right on the other side of that wall, so running things in from outside will be a snap, power is right there, etc. It's also already a noisy environment so there's no problem putting noisy gear in there if I need to.
The problems with the utility room are that there's little space for future expansion, the space that is there is currently occupied by an old manual generator transfer switch that should be removed anyway but which is not part of the spec for the generator job, and it would be directly above the water meter.
I'm not sure that last part matters, to be honest, but it seems like a worthy consideration for electrical equipment. The installer says it'll be fine and I trust them, so I'm sure it'll be fine. It's fine.
On the house side, we're negotiating around the generator transfer switches for where to put the outside low voltage junction box, and how I want the conduit run into the house itself. The installer hasn't ever done anything like this before, so it's new to both of us and I hope we get something useful without too many compromises.
Exciting stuff.