At last...a wired network!

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I've been wanting to run a wired network for about 5 years now. When I finally got really gung ho to get started a couple of years ago, I hit an enormous roadblock that stalled me till recently. The floor under the wall between my library and the rest of the house, under which the cables would have to pass, happens to be underlain by one of the major support beams for the house, and there was no way to drill through that. I slummed with a wireless network instead.

I was stewing about this recently and looking at the existing wiring in the basement again. I finally realized that some of the existing wires (cable, phone) from the library went through the wall and then though the floor through the same hole was the drain from the tub in the guest bath next to the library. Once I took the outlet cover off the outlet in the library, I could see right through from the library to the basement.

So over Christmas, I spent a day running ethernet all over the place. There were three runs: one to the living room for the home entertainment equipment, one to the kitchen for eventual countertop laptop there, and one to the other end of the basement, where in my wildest pipedream I will build a dedicated home theater some day after I win the lottery and finish the basement.

So far, so good, right? Well, more snags. I could not snake the ethernet up the wall into the kitchen. It's an outside wall and was full of insulation (imagine that). To force it through would probably have wadded up my insulation and left a big cold gap at that point. So, that line died. And then the main line, the one to the living room, was only functional for a few minutes. I think what happened is that when I pushed the wires back into the wall and put one the outlet cover, some of the connections in the jack broke. All I knew was suddenly it no longer worked, and I didn't have enough slack to cut off the ends and try again.

So I let it set until last weekend, by which point I had cooled down enough to give it one more shot. I repurposed the line to the kitchen to serve the living room instead. I put on the old connecters and still had no connection. Swapped out the connector on the library end, still no connection. Swapped out the one on the living room end, and voila! A connection.

Today I received my order from Monoprice: an ethernet switch. Now all my connectable components in the living room are connected: TV, receiver, bluray player, and Apple TV (a streaming device). The receiver connection is not working currently; the receiver freezes when I try to run setup. Pioneer told me to do an all reset, which I'm reluctant to do because I will lose all my other settings. The problem is probably a bad NIC card anyway, which would require sending the receiver off to fix, which is not happening. Mostly I wanted the receiver hooked up so I could use a remote app for it on my phone and get one more remote off of the coffee table, but I guess that's not happening. And my TV is too old for Panasonic's current remote app to operate it. But my BD app works, and I have no doubt the Apple TV app will work. And in any case, no more carrying thumb drives around to do firmware updates.

Sigh. Contentment, more or less.
"Olorin I was in the West that is forgotten...."

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