As you already know, I spent last weekend on Lake Mead at Temple Bar Marina. They were without a real network and since I’ve already done work for the company, my name came up when the “who do I call?” question came out.
There are many things I can do with computers. When people ask me exactly what I can do, I tell them everything except programming, which isn’t 100% true, but I don’t count HTML or batch files programming.
Of the skills in my quiver is small office networking. I don’t know Cisco routers (yet), I don’t really know routing tables and DNS (still) gives me fits. That said, if you have an office with 50 or less workstations and a server or 2, I could hook you up.
Of the skills that wasn’t was recently added to my quiver is cabling. Sure I could pull a cable through a hole to connect to a machine under a table, tie-wrap them together to make them look nice and all that. I mean starting-with-raw-cable-and-pulling-it-through-a-building cabling. I’ve never really done that for many reason, one of which is that I don’t have the tools required to do it correctly. Or the patience.
Saturday morning I did a full site walk and started planning where everything was going to go, including setting the spot in the office to be “the server room”, since they don’t have one. Once that was done, I sat down with my 1k feet of CAT5e cable and a brand new bag of RJ-45 adapters and began attempting to make custom length cables. Why? I was trying to do this as cheaply as possible. A bag of 50 RJ-45 ends is about $8 at Fry’s where as punch-down blocks and biscuit jacks cost that much for 2.
An hour later, I was making a run for punch-down blocks and biscuit jacks.
If you haven’t tried to make your own network cables, it’s a little bit like trying to thread a needle. No, scratch that. It’s a little bit like trying to thread 8 needles that have been fused together. And the holes made smaller. and surrounded by a plastic sheath. Assuming you can get all 8 wires (oh yea, in the correct order) in their little slots fully, then you need a special tool to crimp the RJ-45 jack down to secure the wires. They have machines to do this and I now know why.
I ended up pulling about 500′ of cable to create a network with 12 nodes possible and it worked. Now I’m stuck with a bag of RJ-45 ends and a crimp tool. Looks like I’m going to have to give making my own cables another go.
One of the reasons I had to go to the resort in Nevada recently is because they were having issues with the WiFi portions of the network. When most of you think WiFi, you imagine big cushy chairs and your favorite piping-hot caffeinated beverage I’m sure. What I’m dealing with isn’t really anything like that.
Using Buffalo routers and some great parts from the good lads at Radio Labs I built a wireless network that covers about a 1 mile radius (that I think I can stretch to 3 if I really needed to) and support up to 5 separate network nodes at any given time. Again with the tooting of my own horn, it’s pretty cool.
Except when something goes wrong.
To make what could be a terribly long and boring story short, I had to completely reprogram all of the access points and replace the cable that connects the main access point to the 21db antenna on the roof of the motel office. It took me, in total, 12 hours of power cycling, rebooting, reprogramming and replacing cables.
Finally I ended up building a standalone version of the network on Mom’s kitchen table, verified that every thing was working and all of the routers were talking to each other, then started reconnecting them, 1 at a time. It was then, and only then, that the network came back online and connectivity was restored.
Sometimes, to get the results you are looking for, you have to start from scratch.
