TECHNICAL HASSLES
(Posted 2007-08-09 21:15:46 by ArchPaladin)

I've taken this week off from work to get settled in at my new home.  We've
moved all the furniture, unpacked most all the boxes, and are working on
general decor.

One thing we don't really have squared away yet is the Internet.  My
fiancee's father is helping me put Cat6 through the walls to wire the
house, and I've called Comcast and gotten them to bring in a cable modem
and set up the service, but there are still discrepancies between the two. 
The primary problem currently is that the only location in the house that
the cable service comes into is not a location that's close to any of the
Cat6 wall outlets.  As there is still more threading to do, and more cable
jacks in the house, this is a fixable problem, but will take a few days to
sort out.

My arrangement of the garage/office also has something to be desired. 
There are only two outlets in the garage (each halfway up the side of the
wall) and they are not terribly close to where I put the table for my main
desk.  However, these two outlets are in locations that I need to use for
wall hangings and bookshelves, so I'm left the problem of needing really
long cables or clever positioning of computer hardware.  Right now the
garage/office is a mess of cables as everything hasn't quite found its
right home yet.

Still though, everything is coming along nicely.

Part of moving has involved the acquisition of a new network switch.  As
the only switch I had currently was a five-port one, I had to get a new one
to accommodate bringing in cables from all over the house.  The new one I
have gotten is a managed switch, and it has required some configuration to
make work.  However, to perform this configuration I have needed to connect
use a dumb terminal connected through a serial modem cable, which is
something I've never done before.  I ended up having to use a Linux
distribution specifically designed [ http://www.asashi.net/pages/pitux.html
] [asashi.net] for the task.  Lots of old technology involved - makes me
thankful that I keep a lot of older technology around as it made this task
considerably easier.

I may be acquiring some more technical goodies within the next few months
or so.  I have a couple of services I want to run here at home (MythTV [
http://mythtv.org/ ] [mythtv.org] is one) that will require some technical
gadgets that I don't have yet.  More experimentation and fun may come soon.

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