The cruft has finally been banished to hard-to-reach corners and cracks in the wall, allowing us to take the first run at getting the new LAN in place. We had visualized a more vertical substrate hugging the wall, but time prudence and our ‘deconstruct’ mantra dictated recycling the old LAN rack, also formerly home to a cordless phone, phone books and assorted papers that didn’t fit elsewhere (yet another junk catcher).

This time around the rack is full, so maybe it won’t catch old financial statements et al. The bottom shelf houses the new gigabit switches and the half-terabyte array, while the top holds the cable-modem and a new guest ’sandbox’ network that allows easy wireless and wired firewalled net access that can’t see anything on the new gigabit LAN.

We’ve been testing this evening, and the net appears to be fast and stable. The Cat 5 is all off the floor, tucked into cable guides and/or velcroed or otherwise tied down. Not quite full ‘pro,’ but much better than previously.

We will also soon have a much more secure WiFi router bridged to the LAN, and all the WiFi gear goes to an elevated location that should improve coverage around the house and patio (opening some amusing possibilities, I hope).

Next up will be getting services in place – people oriented things like streaming WBGO (Linda’s favorite straight-ahead jazz station, in Newark, NJ) available throughout the house. The kitchen computer shall return, complete with internal recipe database and access to the usual web-based repositories like Epicurious. Finally coming together…

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