old mac new life.

So an idea from a post on the totally über-Apple-centric tech blog Unplggd inspired granting an extended life to Julian's now old eMac that Santa gave him when he was six and that he used diligently and dare I say quite expertly - maxing out it's capabilities with Photoshop and GarageBand and thereby earning himself a much peppier and newer iMac. I've bothered myself setting it up (doing a clean install of 10.4.11 to get rid of all Julian's old stuff etc.) and getting an Airport card (didn't do my homework first to discover it is only 401b - not g - so fairly useless but I was only out fifteen bucks) followed by USB bluetooth and 401b/g wi-fi adaptors. And putting to good use the first pair of Apple bluetooth mouse and keyboard since I splurged and upgraded to the newer versions for the Mini setup in the living room -

I've bothered myself with all of that but I'm not convinced how long that 700MHz eMac will sit there (since it's a CRT the screen garbles when the microwave kicks in and it's kind of slow and clunky) - but if we get used to having a handy Mac in the kitchen to stream our iTunes, look up recipes, have our to-do and lists for the store and the constant NOAA forecast and widget games like Sudoku and the NASA image of the day I may have to hook us up with a newer 17" G5 iMac or built-in Mac Mini ... we'll see.

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And just FYI the online article from Ready Made magazine talks about what it takes to make that Mac Mini built-in.

structured wiring part two.

It's raining now I can hear outside the window. Sitting on the couch next to it. Wasn't raining a couple hours ago when I ran out to the garage. Thankfully didn't really rain all weekend. It was nice. A light light sprinkle maybe wandering around downtown Seattle Friday night but we didn't have rain shells and it was fine.

So today I set out to finish the first stage of this structured wiring business. It was supposed to be a relatively simple ordeal - last night I had spent an hour or so down in the basement closet on a ladder crimping Cat 5e connectors to the ends of all the cables I had run -

To run the cables into the house I had used a piece of scrap PVC plumbing, drilled through the drywall from in the crawlspace and caulked around the PVC to hold it in there.

But then the first thing I discovered this afternoon when I set out to start was that all the patch cables I already own were wired the Type B way while I had arbitrarily decided to wire all of my stuff (ports and crimped connectors both) Type A. Good times. Should have checked beforehand. Duh.

Oh well, so that meant I had to rewire all the ports. Then cut off all the connectors I fastened last night and redo. Not the worst thing I guess. So this is what the one in Julian's bedroom looked like (labeling and all) after rewiring and with that decora quickport plate -

The two blanks will likely be RG6 cable in/out.

But once all that was done, I tested - made some more patch cables with my crimping tool, double-checked the ports and the connectors, etc. etc. etc. Had to run two surge protectors cos of the stupid transformer plugs for the two switches, router/switch and modem (cos I also needed to plug in the backup drive and Mac servers) and then I started plugging everything in -

I had drilled a 2" hole in the shelf to stuff all the cables through and then back up - as opposed to cutting them off to length (I had guessed how much I needed when doing the cabling for each run - better to have too much than get all the way across the house and realize I didn't have enough). That way I have extra cable if I ever need it (and with, well, all my shirts back on that side of the closet that wiring mess is pretty well hidden anyway) -

In order to accommodate two Mac servers and a monitor (which is probably something like a hundred pounds), I had to get creative ... the height between the shelf and the ceiling was perfect in that it was just enough room to fit a G4 tower, but that meant I couldn't reinforce it with some 2x4s underneath (cos that would raise it an inch and a half and then the G4s wouldn't fit). So I drilled and found some studs (I could see the crap drywall tape and nails giving away where they were) to secure some shelf brackets underneath and help support the weight of all the computer gear -

Then it was just a matter of heaving them up there and connecting the firewire backup drive to the main server (Titanium) and both it and the backup/auxiliary server Radon (my former Logic workhorse) to the switch -

(where I spent cramped up most of the day ... )

The monitor is up there for now, but likely won't stay. I can control both the Macs via a VNC client on my laptop so they don't need a keyboard/mouse or monitor. So now everything is humming down there instead of, well, in my bathroom. It sounds much more natural to hear the sound of hard drives spinning away in a closet.

And, uhh, someday I'll have my actual bedroom closet back and - well - won't have to use this one anymore. I'm just happy not to have to step on/over the cable that ran from the bathroom out to the living room corner that I had gotten used to doing for the last year or two. Good times.

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So the really frustrating part of the day came when I went to connect the Mac Mini and it - uhh, didn't work. It said the ethernet cable wasn't connected. But. It. Was.

So I tested the same port/cable configuration on Julian's iMac. Worked fine. And the LG ethernet TV. Ditto. So WTF.

As in - WTF!!!???

Ooh boy.

Oh, and the new G5 ... same thing. No ethernet cable even though it was connected. And with the whole Type A/Type B fiasco it took me longer than it should have to realize maybe it was an OS deal instead of maybe me mis-wiring one of the ports or connectors. But finally I Googled around and discovered pretty quick people on the Apple forums complaining about the same problem - an unconnected ethernet cabled despite it being plugged in.

And after perusing some of the responses it looked like the resolution was to manually dumb down the port from gigabit (1000BaseT) to 100BaseT. But why? I have gigabit switches ... and all my Macs were set up on gigabit before. The only thing that I changed now is instead of the wires running directly from each switch to each Mac - now they run from the switch to a port, and then a patch cable from the port to each machine.

I have no idea ... I'm going to be Googling some more to find out why cos it sorta irks me. I want gigabit. But oh well. Reminded myself even though the day was sorta crappy cos of that, a crappy day for me would be a stellar one for far too many people ... always try to keep some perspective.

And I know I've said I hate plumbing but - I think I hate networking even more. Or at least as much. And when I said how I hated plumbing I mentioned how I never use that word. Except for plumbing. And now for networking.

And by no means is this finished - I plan on installing an actual panel for this stuff, and like I said I still have more Cat 5 and RG6 and possibly speaker wires to run ... but the stuff is out of the bathroom now so I can get to gutting the rest of it. That'll be fun! No, really.

structured wiring part one.

So I have been meaning to get around to starting this little networking project for some time now. Last spring I think it was I bought a 500' spool of RG6 and a thousand foot box o' Cat 5E cable (and subsequently found probably another 300' or so at a garage sale the following week which I picked up for something like five bucks). And the crimpers and everything etc. etc. But then it sat and collected dust cos, well, there were bigger fish to fry.

But with the remodel of our Jack and Jill bath looming, I need to get the - uhh, networking sh*t out of the, uhh - bathroom. So, our current networking solution -

G4 server with Apple LCD/keyboard/etc., OWC backup firewire drive, cable modem/router and switches. Oh, and our printer. Yeah, that's right - sitting in the bathtub (that's going to be gone, along with the windows and in its place a beautiful Kohler jetted tub with granite deck and paneling and ... ). And a scanner and other various things lying about in this room that I half-gutted like three years ago and then let it sit. It's slightly embarrassing. But it's going to hopefully be beautiful but that's for another post. Don't get me started.

Anywhoo, I needed to get the computer crap out of there. Which meant crawling under the house, likely a big reason why I had not been all that motivated - up until now with being forced to - to get the structured wiring underway. But after a long-ish day and most of it done, I can say it really wasn't all that bad. Thanks a ton to my little helper who saved me hours of headache cos I could sit under the house after drilling holes up through the sole plates of the walls feeding him cable after cable and he'd yank them up and label each one and then tape them to the wall -

Since my house sits pretty high it's quite spacious under there, and someone had the foresight to install a light fixture so I just sat in the dirt waiting for Julian to finish labeling each cable before feeding him another. I had to get creative with some, but nothing a handy fishtape could not solve. So after it started to get dark, I was pretty much wrapped having gotten cable from the living room and Julian's room (the two rooms needing to be cabled right away) and got the cable dropped (as in video cable for our internet connection) from my bedroom down through the basement ceiling (thanks fishtape!) over to the basement closet where I ran all the other networking cables today (where the electrical panel is) and where all that stuff now in the bathroom will live -

And then once all the cables were run from the various rooms (there's still another set of four Cat 5E runs to make in the front living room corner, a set of four from my bedroom, and some more cable and possible audio/video - speaker wire and such - runs to be made but that's for another day and now that I know it's not too terrible and I have access to everything I need it won't be bad), I got to work splicing the ports onto the ends of each cable (thanks Katie for immortalizing this moment haha) -

(and still planning on getting that Gator rack case for the audio/video equipment and moving it to a different location, then mounting the TV on the wall above where the white paneling will be ... )

I wrote out a schematic for all the runs and ports I am planning on (for now, the diagram will get more complicated as I add in the cable/audio/video stuff) and just went off that and the labels Julian and I had taped to each cable -

It was a simple matter. I ordered these Leviton decora quickport adaptors for electrical boxes where - instead of placing a single low-voltage wall box - I was adding the ports to where an outlet already existed. And I'm cutting out the old, single-gang box and replacing with a double-gang with the quickport adaptors. Easy peasy.

And yeah, I feel accomplished. Finally I can get a proper spot for our networking stuff - and I've got a big chunk of the groundwork laid for any further structured wiring I want to design (HDMI, an audio system in various rooms of the house, etc. etc.). I've overlooked voice for now, but the sweet thing about Cat 5E cable is it can do just about anything - from up to four voice lines to high-definition video - it's über-flexible and expansive. So once the cables are there, it's just a matter of figuring out what do with them. And they can be changed out on either end really easily.

OK - and yeah, like I said - this is just making way to completely gutting this bathroom that has been hideous and more or less unusable for years and start on the remodel of it which I have been planning for something like three years or so. Good times.

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Food for thought:

- existing G4 tower server storing all music/movies and backed-up with existing setup (external drive and SuperDuper! backup software)

- existing Mini connected to main home audio/video system in living room

- old G4/G5 tower or mini or whatever as sub-system for bedrooms - running iTunes of course (same iTunes library file from the G4 server used by all Macs in the house) and connected to my old Pioneer receiver (with A/B speaker configurability) plugged into an outlet with a simple programmable timer (like the kind people get to turn their lights on/off while they're on holiday) so it turns on/off when I want it - turn volume up as far as I'd want on the receiver and the Mac and leave it - that way I could control all the transport functions of the music/video in iTunes/DVD player/QT or whatever and the volume on the Mac using VNC and my laptop - I would never have to touch the receiver or worry about having an IR feed from each room back to it

- in-wall speakers (with possible in-wall sub?) in my bedroom and either Julian's bedroom or the kitchen - connected to the old Pioneer A/B speaker outs

Anyways, just thinking aloud ...