FusionMods

I wanted to give a quick update. My computers been running excellently since i finished the build. But there was one small thing that I had over-looked. Since all of my drives have been recycled from the last build and then going back and back I still have IDE cdroms, and my primary hard drive is still an IDE drive. While almost all motherboards still come with one IDE controller, not all of them come with two IDE controller. So currently I do not have any CDRoms working, lol. Fortunatly I ordered a PCI expansion card from newegg to give me two extra IDE controllers. These are incredibly cheap, mine cost $15. But read the fine print, some are made to only function as raid controllers, some will only work with hard drives, so make sure you know what you’re getting.

My IDE controller will be arriving tomorrow

well with my new house coming right along with all the work we’re doing on it, it’s actually getting to the point that things like paint and wiring for cable and internet are finally coming into my mind as something i should start soon.

Of all my supplies, the one thing I still needed to network the entire house was the switch. Well since it’s a new place, I wanted to get a gigabit switch, and being the person that I am, i really didn’t want the small “4 port typical home use” gigabit router, so I started my search. This is something that if you want to have a lot of network access but don’t plan to utilize gigabit (don’t feel back, most computer over 2-3 years old probably aren’t even capable of it since it’s still pretty new). I checked newegg, and the price of a brand new 24 port gigabit switch was on average $500 and up. Well I just bought a house so I’m on a budget. I checked out my old favorite place, eBay.

Now I did have to deal with someone snagging my first choice with under 5 seconds left on the auction, so I buckled down and did a “Buy Now” option for a re-certified netgear switch. Thats 24 ports of gigabit, and it looks great. Now I ended up paying a little over $100, but if you just want to do 10/100 (which is still great for any large lan party, you get land a 24 port switch for around $10-15 before shipping. It’s really crazy some times the deals you can get on slightly aged tech stuff since it has such a fast depreciation.

One note of caution though. You won’t run into this much with the 10/100 switches, but if you go for gigabit, and even for really any switch, it’s good to google the model of the stuff you’re buying just to make sure the info is accurate. First time i googled gigabit switch and saw a 48 port switch for under $100 I almost freaked out. But upon googling it, it’s only 10/100 across the 48 ports, with just two uplink gigabit ports. And that was a really common theme. If you ask me, having only two uplink ports doesn’t justify a title of “Gigabit Switch”, but thats the market we live in, so everyone, make sure you know just what you’re buying!!

Once this arrives I’ll be trying to find the network cable ends and my tester and then I’ll be starting this fun task. I’ll be sure to post some shots of everything too because I know the first time I made some network cable, I would have killed for a guide with some pics, haha.

I’m into just about all areas of tech, from hardware, to softwware (coding and using), and even industry news.

This is why today I wanted to talk about p2p usage. This is an incredibly interesting topic if you’re given the information from anyone but the RIAA or MPAA because as we’ve seen in the past, they don’t always know what they’re talking about.

I’m going to start this by briefly going over that p2p is and how it works. p2p or Peer-to-Peer is a technology that exists by transferring files directly between users. This is used by almost everyone at some point, the concept is not exclusive for those designated as p2p applications.

The interesting stuff is that p2p technology has really led some incredible innovations that would probably be more accepted if they didn’t continue to get blasted by the mainstream media. most p2p applications work by breaking content down into many small pieces and downloading from a large large number of sources. This means that it can simultaneously grab many bits of the downloaded file all at once, and the people supplying those pieces won’t be bogged down. This method also incredibly improves download speeds. Here is a perfect example of how one university applied this same p2p technology to their servers, reducing their distribution servers from 20 down to 2, and the distribution time from up to 4 days down to 4 hours. This technology is slowly creaping up all over the place.

Now before I get to the point of this article, I do want to say that p2p software is not illegal in any sense. By design it is an equivalent of a cd burner or tape recorder. It does get to be used for a number of copyright infringement cases, but just like guns, you can really only blame the user, unless you’re comcast of course, lol.

Well currently the biggest news in the p2p circles is ThePirateBay and their current court activity. They operate outside of the US and as such are not held to US standards on copyright law. Though they do still have to deal with some of it, just not as much. Their site indexes many p2p trackers, making them available to connect to, in a very similar way that google indexes web sites.

I’d recommends that everyone follow the trial against ThePirateBay. This court case will easily be a corner stone in many courts around the world as it’s the first to bring a full attack against the owners of such a site instead the users. The funny part is, by the end of the second day in court, the 50% of their evidence against ThePirateBay had to be thrown out. Today on their third day it looks like things are going even smoother.

This is a landmark case over file sharing. Even though it’s not in the US, it is being pushed heavily by US influence. I recommend that everyone keepp reading up on this stuff.

Day 1 – http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-first-day-in-court/
Day 2 – http://torrentfreak.com/50-of-charges-against-pirate-bay-dropped-090217/
Day 3 – http://torrentfreak.com/g-defense-090218/

The bulk of my supplies will be arriving today and tomorrow. This weekend I’ll be starting to wire up my house and I’ve really been thinking about some of the things I’d like to expand upon in this home network. One Issue I’m becoming more and more concerned over is backing up a good amount of my data. I’m not talking about anything special, but just a lot of my own projects and files that I’d rather not lose for any reason.

I have a very old P3 server that I’m thinking would be a perfect candidate. Currently It’ll need a few small upgrades, but for an immediate application, it should work great as a dedicated storage box. This will be something else I do a full write up on, but I just wanted to post a couple pics of this because it looks pretty cool.

Now one thing you’ll find is that Computer Modding is probably the nerdiest thing i do, lol. Either way, this is the home storage server I’m going to update a bit for the job. That is also the rack mount I’ll be using. Above it are a few hubs and switches. The bottom 24 port switch is currently in use, running my parents home network. I’m currently scouring the internet for a gigabit switch that I’ll be using for mine. As for the hubs, I don’ot really have any kind of need for those any more.

Also I just thought this might be a cool spot to shout this out, if you guys like modding, here’s a cool gallery of case mods, http://fusionmods.net/index.php?theCase=casevote – This as a topic will probably come up in the future.

In a bit of a precursor for running my home network I though I’d list some of the supplies I’ve got ready and the ones I’m going to be hunting down still.

Before I get rambling into a list of supplies with pretty nerdy definitions, I want to give a few definitions…
- Network Router – This connects two networks. In this case it will connect the internet with my house. Most modern routers have a number of ports built into them, which is essentially a small switch.
- Network Switch – A switch is very similar to a router, but it doesn’t create a sub network, it just extends what it is connected to.

Now I’m sure this sounds fairly insignificant in the differences, but the setup is very common. Most home networks never need more than the common 4 ports on their home use router. But I’m big into my computer stuff, so of course, I’m going big on this, lol. I’m planning two internet lines to each room. This will give me the option of two computers per room, or a computer and network printer, or a computer and a gaming console. I’m not honestly expecting to fill all of these, but I’m really looking to avoid running the 50ft lines of cable across the hall, lol.

So why use a switch and not the cheaper option of a hub? Well don’t be fooled. While a hub looks like a switch, it’s not half as powerful. The real difference is inside the box. And I want to apologized in advance because this will get a little technical, but it’s something you’ll want to know if you’re doing a similar project. When a hub receives a network signal, it replicates that signal across all ports and hopes someone picks it up. That sounds great except it ties up all ports while being used. This causes congestion since no other computers can talk while another is. A Switch is a lot smarter in its operation. When a signal is sent to it, it knows to send that only to the other port that needs to receive this communication. This means that you can have a large number of network traffic before it starts to slow down the connections.

Additionally, the reason I’m not stringing a large number of routers together is because of something called DHCP. This is what maps out which computer is connected to which port. Stringing a number of routers together first just looks messy, and each router will create it’s own sub network, making it very difficult for the computers to connect to each other and share resources. A Switch will only expand upon that established network.

So with that said, here’s my current list of supplies.

Here are my current supplies…

Cat6 Network Cable
Cable Ends
Cable Tester
Wall plates
Patch Panel
4-port wireless router

As for the supplies i still need, I’m hutning over ebay for an affordable 24 port switch. I currently have a 12 port 10/100 switch laying around at home, but I’d like to up the capacity a little. And depending on the price, I’m going to be trying to line up a gigabit switch, 100/1000 across all ports would be excellent,  otherwise I’m just sticking with a simple 10/100.

The operation of this will be as follows…

Thats my plan in a nutshell. This post really covers the intro to the networking principles. My next post will be in a week or so and will be the actually process with a ton of live shots. I’ll have pictures of all the materials, tools, and equipment.

If you guys have any comments or questions, I’d love to hear them!

Welcome to the FusionMods blog. I’m new to blogging, but not writing tech articles. For the past two years I’ve been running a fairly successful tech site. The tech site is extremely more in depth than I hope to take this blog, but I’m thinking this should be a very helpful and interesting blog for anyone interested in tech projects.

Currently I’ve just bought my first home. So with that being said, I’m looking to chronicle a large number of my home computer projects. These will range from networking, to home storage and even come some of the more basic things like setting up file and printer sharing.  I’m really looking to aim these towards a general public where you won’t need to know all the boring tech background to get started, and if some of it gets too tech oriented, I’m planning to give all that background info

So if you guys have any questions along the way or have anything that you’d really like to see, please feel free to post your requests. And if anyone has any requests for some of the far higher end topics, I’d like to refer you to my tech site, http://www.fusionmods.net. FusionMods is a fully dedicated tech community with a ton of extremely helpful members that have a ton of knowledge.