In July of 2013 I left the profession that I spent four and a half years of college learning how to do (education) and began working as a helper in the fire alarm/communications field, where I had absolutely no experience. I started out learning a little bit of the fire alarm field and learned some of the ins and outs of installation of a fire alarm system. After a few months I began working with various security systems, including access control and surveillance. After picking up on these specific fields rather quickly I worked my way into a company vehicle in October. I began working as a technician at the recommendation of the technician I had been helping the previous few months.
I began working with a lot of wireless technology including many systems that required some basic knowledge of networking. I began picking up on this side of my job and became very interested in it. After being in and out of many information technology and server rooms, I began to think of how cool and useful it could be to have something small like this in my own house.
In November of 2013, my wife and I found out that we were expecting our first child, a baby boy. While putting together a registry for my wife's baby shower, I knew that I wanted to have a baby monitor that supported video and that supported viewing on iOS devices. I began looking into many of these and realized quickly that this was going to be a very expensive investment. After coming to this realization, I began looking for alternatives to an app supported baby monitor.
A few weeks ago my wife found this story, that details how a hacker had terrorized a baby and the baby's parents by hacking into the IP camera that the couple used as a baby monitor and yelling obscenities at the baby. This gave me an idea, I was going to run network cable to my son's room and connect his room to my home network, but it would all be hard wired, making it more difficult for a hacker to do something like this.
I found the Tenvis IPROBOT 3 on eBay for $79.99 which supports 720p HD video and two way audio and decided I would use that for his baby monitor.
I also figured that while I was going to hard wire his room into my network, I might as well use the knowledge I had gained over the past 10 months at my new job, and network the entire house. My set-up before deciding to do this was rather simple. It included a Motorola SB5101 U Surfboard Cable Modem and a Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band Router. Basically every device in my house has always been connected to my router wirelessly, with the exception of the Xbox that I sold about a year ago.
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| My Motorola SB1501U Surfboard Cable Modem (Left) and Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band Router (Right). |
Once I had decided that I was going to network the entire house, I began looking for network switches. I had decided that a 24 port gigabit switch was going to be best for me, because that would allow me to put four Cat5e jacks in each bedroom of my house, four in my living room, four in my den, and give me three more ports on the switch for other things that may come up (subtract one for the port used to connect the switch to the router). I may be down to two shortly after finishing because I already have a network hard drive planned.
After looking for about a week, I found a TRENDnet TEG-S224 24 port 10/100 Mbps switch with two gigabit ports on eBay. The switch was described as used but taken from a working environment. I looked through the pictures that showed a few scratches here and there, but determined that ultimately, this would be a good buy, the seller was asking $25.00, with a $12.00 shipping charge. The cheapest list price I found on this switch brand new was $97.99 from newegg.com. I figured at a $60 discount, the eBay switch was worth a try.
I received my switch from the seller on eBay a few days ago. I took it out of the box to try it out and upon plugging it in, realized that it sounded a little, loud, for lack of a better term. Once I saw that it was loud I decided I would take the cover off and see what was causing the noise. I saw that the fan was rattling against the housing, so I put a few thin pieces of foam under the spots where the fan touched the housing. I put the cover back on plugged it up and it was considerably more quiet.
After getting the loud fan problem fixed, I decided I would patch the switch into my router and test it by patching my laptop into the switch. Once I got everything hooked up, I immediately went to YouTube to test out the speed of my connection. I found that having a hardwired connection to my network was considerably faster than a wireless one. The YouTube video I looked up loaded immediately upon clicking the link and began playing without buffering. I knew that I had made the right decision in networking the house.
I have picked the spot in my house where all of my network equipment will be located. I picked my utility room downstairs (I live in a split level), because it is centrally located in my house, and my HVAC unit is in there so it is almost always cooler in that room than anywhere else in the house. The picture below shows the location for all of my equipment and what my switch looks like. I decided to set a couple of pieces of scrap carpet under the switch the cushion it and cut down on the sound of the fan. That, coupled with the foam I set under the fan, has made the switch pretty quiet.
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| TRENDnet TEG-S224 24 Port 10/100 Mbps Switch w/ 2 Gigabit Ports |
Thanks for reading!
Phillip
