The Glade 4.0

Okay, so my network came up in another thread a few weeks ago. I'm frustrated and would like to do something about it. My house has every room wired for CAT5. It's junctioned in a closet at the top of the floor 1 pic. There's a cable hook-up and power in that same panel.

The blue dots represent things I'm using now. The living room layout for wiring on floor 1 sucks pretty bad. The CAT5 and original cable hook-up are on a wall where it makes no sense to have a TV. I had the cable guy drill through the wall opposite it, which is the jack I'm using there now. The room where I have the cable modem and G-router are right above my living room. All rooms are carpeted except the Kitchen/Foyer area on floor 1.

Things I have:
Living Room, Floor 1
PS3/XBox 360 in the room directly below it
Room 2, Floor 2
DD-WRT flashed Linksys G-router
Cable modem
2 desktop boxes wired directly into router.
maybe a 10/100 switch sitting in a box somewhere.

Any ideas on how I can improve my situation?

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The Dude abides.

The thing to do that would require no re-wiring would be to move the cable modem and router into the closet. You'd probably end up running cables around the floorboards in the two rooms where you're using equipment. Given that you've got carpet, you can probably disguise that pretty well. If you can remove the hub and instead hook the lines you're using into your router, perfect. Run the PS3 on its built-in wifi and throw your 10/100 switch in the room with the desktops, and you're golden.

Alternately, you could re-run the cabling to get two cables per room to the closet -- use the old cables as a pull for the new ones. That gets rid of the need for the switch and wifi PS3.

Is there a basement? Moving the living room's wiring shouldn't be a terrible ordeal in a relatively modern (drywall) home, if so. If not, I can see why you're posting.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Well, I guess I'm not really sure how to go about pulling the carpet back such that I can get it to go back down and stay down once I peel it up to run a wire under it. In the living room, the CAT5 jack is on a wall that doesn't attach to any of the other living room walls. So I could get it to come down to the carpet. But at a certain point, it's just carpet against tile with no wall. So it won't just tuck neatly back under a baseboard.

When I said hub in the closet, it's not actual hardware. I just mean a junction where all the lines and their respective jacks meet. So I can just run short cables from those jacks right into the router.

And yeah, Arizona doesn't really have basements. I have pictures of all the wiring and such. I don't feel confident I could reliably pull the cables back through the holes in the framing they ran them through. It was a pretty crappy job. I don't think they put a lot of thought into this setup.

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The Dude abides.

Yeah, the reason I asked was I know Texas is the same way most of the time; lots of slab foundations.

As for the carpet/tile junction -- is there one of the metal strip thingies where they meet? Because I'd pull that up, run the cable underneath, and then but it back down. Then, as you said, tuck the cables under/against the baseboards.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Is your router a wireless model? Most are, but I feel it's worth asking.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

IIRC, the other thread he references involved troubleshooting mysterious symptoms on his wireless X-Box/PS3 where the wifi ended up being strongly implicated.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Homeplug AV?

Okay so yeah, I went to look at things again to get an idea of what would be involved. Turns out what I remembered as the CAT5 jack in the living room was a friggin cable jack. The CAT5 line is in the friggin kitchen. There isn't one in the living room. What the hell?!

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The Dude abides.

That doesn't eliminate it as an option. He can set up a wireless access point to sit on top of the entertainment center, and have the Xbox and PS3 cable into that. Such an arrangement would benefit any laptops used in the house, as the signal would be rebroadcast from the AP.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

My router is a wireless model - I said "G-router" above but I guess I could have been clearer on that point.

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The Dude abides.