I’ve just bought a nice new desk for my home office:

When I assembled the new desk, I took the opportunity to refine my home network setup. In this post I’ll walk through that setup.

I’ve got the router in the living room, along with the two NUC6i’s that I use for my lzlabs development work:

I run the NUCs headless, using ssh and command line access for my work. For those times that I need to refresh the install image and need a display, I also have them HDMI connected to the living room TV, and direct connected with short ethernet cables to the router:

The router is also directly connected to the PS3 (for netflix), and then runs through some ethernet lines that I fished into the basement, before some of the basement finishing work we did just after we moved in. All the lines I have going into the basement terminate in a patch panel:

Does a patch panel sound like overkill? Yes, it probably is. However, I’ve got a pile of roughed in ethernet lines to the kids rooms and the rec room that I’ll eventually fish into the electrical-panel/laundry/network room:

I’d like to also eventually fish some ethernet lines into the upstairs space (i.e. for netflix run off a blue-ray player that sits mostly unused in the master bedroom), but that’s a harder fishing job, and I haven’t done it yet. From the front of the patch panel things go off to the router:

and from there to a switch:

One line comes from the router (through the patch panel), and then all the rest of the ethernet lines from the switch go to final destinations. Four of those lines go back to the patch panel and up to the office space. One is plugged into one of the thunderbolt monitors, so I can use a wired connection while “docked”. One goes up to the office space and is connected to an Odroid (which can run the Lz stack on aarch64 hardware). One line goes back to the living room, for optional wired couch surfing, and the last is connected to a voip phone.

I’ve got a lot of finishing touches to do. I plan to mount the patch panel next to the electrical panel, instead of just placing it on top of the freezer down in the laundry room. I’ve also got lines that are running through the ceiling, but are hanging loose still. The wall panel in my office space is currently hanging loose:

I have a low voltage wiring box purchased, but need to cut the hole for it, so I can screw in this little panel and get it nicely out of the way, and do the plastering and painting to fix up the messy fishing holes I made trying to find a route down into the basement.