dedicated an entire closet to be the heart of my home network. I actually screwed a piece

of plywood to the wall so that I could freely mount any network hardware that I needed.

My main connection to the internet is this standard old cable modem, provided by Charter

Cable. I actually have 2 terabytes of file storage. The way I have this configured is

with 4 hard drives, each one being 1 terabyte. However, only two of the hard drives are used

for file sharing. The other two are backup drives and each night a script is run to automatically

clone the data from the main hard drives. These drives are all daisy chained through

a single firewire connection on this old Mac Mini G4, which works as my file server and

web server, amongst other things. I also do my voice narration recording in here. That

is why I have the big microphone connected. All of these ethernet cables go up into the

attic where they're distributed around the house to wall jacks, like this one. I labeled

each jack with a number that corresponds to a particular port on a particular switch.

That way if I ever need to troubleshoot a connection, I know where the other end goes.

I'm a strong believer in ethernet. While I do have two wireless access points in my house,

one at each end, I do not use these for anything except mobile devices. So I have quite a few

things connected to my ethernet switches. I'll show you some of it. I have a color laser

printer. I do not believe in inkjet printers. I think they are a big waste of money since

the ink costs more than the printer. I also have a black and white laser, copier, and

scanner on the network. This is my main office, or computer room. This is how things look

day to day, I didn't clean anything up for you. This is my main computer, which is a

Mac Mini. This is where I edit all of my videos. Here is a workbench I use for everything from

repairing computers to shooting videos of things. These two Mac Mini setups are for

my two kids. I even have a computer in my garage. I have a cheap monitor on the wall

and this old Mac Mini G4. I use it mostly for displaying PDF images or searching the

web while I'm working on projects in the garage. This is my wife's desk, and yes it stays that

messy most of the time. This is my living room TV. Besides the Nintendo Wii, you'll

also little black Western Digital box. This thing is wired into my network and allows

me to watch Netflix, Hulu, or files stored on my local main file server. I have one of

these on every TV in the house. This is essentially our only source of television content. We

have no cable or satellite. Well, I hope you enjoyed the tour. I would just like to point

out that a lot of people think I have this extravogent, expensive computer network. And

really, I don't. Most of the equipment I've bought used off of eBay for nearly nothing.

So I don't have a lot of money invested in my network. But what I do have a lot invested

is time. Particularly when it comes to running all of the ethernet cables. I've typically

done it over a period of years on an as-needed basis. I started off with one switch, then

two, and now three. And it more or less works like this. We re-arrange a room and we're

like "Oh well, now we need an ethernet jack over here" so I run a new jack. And just over

a period of several years I've ended up with nearly 48 network jacks in the house, so I

have a live ethernet jack on every wall. I'm really, really a proponent of ethernet. I

mean, I know everybody loves wireless because it's so convenient. And nearly every device

I have in the house is capable of wireless but I just don't like it because it's not

fast enough, its not reliable enough, it's too complicated. You've got to deal with SSID's,

encryption, interference problems, and range issues and you know, so I just do not use

wireless unless it's a mobile device like an iPad, or laptop, or iPhone, or iPod, or

something like that. Everything else, I just much prefer to plug the wire in. It works,

and it always works, and it keeps on working, and I don't have to worry about any of the

complicated mess of wireless. So that's just the way I do things. Anyway, leave some comments.

Tell me what you think. Till next time!