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Wiring my home with fiber

sschueller.github.io

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Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#201

Post by latchkey »

zippergz wrote: post #189
latchkey wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just redid my whole kitchen to the studs. You're making it out to be a bigger deal than it is. Now I'm onto a bedroom where I removed two whole walls that had been weirdly built to cut the room into a smaller room. This is going to require a bunch of repair work, all the way to the ceilings. Certainly, if you're looking for perfectly smooth walls, then you're never going to be happy regardless. My place is Santa Fe…

By removing and replacing entire walls, you are missing out on most of the difficult parts of texture and paint matching (and "just paint the whole wall" quickly turns into "paint the whole room" in some cases). I suppose you could make the argument that we should then just rip out the entire wall to run a single cable, but I personally think that's extreme both in cost and disruption. I'm glad you had such an easy t…

I didn't say it was easy... it just isn't so overblown "hire a professional" as people make it out to be. I was terrified before I started, but once I watched a bunch of YT videos and then got to work... it ended up being a lot less stressful than I imagined.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#202

Post by RealStickman_ »

Symbiote wrote: post #196
sponaugle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hobbies are almost by definition not cost optimized!

Some are, like growing your own food or backpacking.

You'd earn more money by working overtime and buying food from the supermarket instead of spending time growing it yourself.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#203

Post by rootusrootus »

kuschku wrote: post #155
blinded wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youd be surprised what you can do with a 40in drill bit and a wire snake. did my whole house and only had to repair 1 piece of dry wall.

With that drill bit you won't be able to get far with concrete brick walls... I hired an electrician to drill the holes for me earlier this year and it took him over 10 minutes per hole to get through the 60cm (2ft) reinforced concrete slab for running cables between two floors.

Honestly, 10 minutes to go through 2 feet of concrete is damn impressive. I had to put a couple 50A electric circuits through my foundation a few months back and I'm pretty sure we spent more like 45 minutes getting through. And we didn't even hit any rebar, which is a minor miracle itself.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#204

Post by bmitc »

screamingninja wrote: post #4
uri4 wrote: post #3

I wonder what is use case for this network. At my home I only use optics for long run, more for galvanic isolation, as electric charge could destroy electronics. All servers are concentrated in single room. Clients use miniPCs. Rest of the house is wired with 2.5Gb ethernet and wifi6, anything faster and expenses grow exponentially.

I second this. ~$1375 vs under $200 for an Ethernet run. Expensive project just to be able to say "I did it".

There are other benefits of fiber, such as transmitting non-Ethernet signals such as USB, DisplayPort, HDMI, etc. You can run these things over Ethernet, but they are really shoddy and unreliable.

It allows you to centralize more things. For example, you could just have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a hub in a room for a computer, where the computer is actually somewhere else (such as a server room).

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#205

Post by Symbiote »

RealStickman_ wrote: post #202
Symbiote wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some are, like growing your own food or backpacking.

You'd earn more money by working overtime and buying food from the supermarket instead of spending time growing it yourself.

That depends on the food. My parents mostly grew fruit, and berries especially are very expensive at the supermarket.

The other things they grew were also equal or better to the most expensive produce at the most luxury supermarket, like tomatoes that tasted of tomato rather than the watery, red golf balls they sell in Asda.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#206

Post by rootusrootus »

sokoloff wrote: post #184
sponaugle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed the plastic bag trick works very very well in a lot of different use cases. I was able to pull twine over 500 feet with this technique while doing my driveway conduits.

I had about 50 feet and 270° of bends in some PVC conduits I'd buried under a section of yard. I'd gotten everything done and asked my wife to come help me get the poly string and then mule tape into the conduits. The poly line practically leapt into the conduit chasing the plastic bag. It was one of the greatest ratios between how hard I thought something might be and how hard it actually was.

Pulling a bit of twine through from my pool over to where I had installed my equipment pad went much the same way, and I was too dumb to think about using a plastic bag ;). Just stuffed a bit of twine in one and and left it loose, walked over to the other and and put a shop vac on it, and -whoosh- here came the string. Felt like cheating. It was only a small conduit, though, 3/4 inch, so it had pretty good airflow.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#207

Post by coder543 »

voidwtf wrote: post #111
runjake wrote: post #5

This article is great overall, but there is some stuff you should do differently, if you're wanting to follow in the author's footsteps: 1. Just use UPC connectors everywhere unless you have really good reasons not to. 2. Use single mode fiber (SMF) everywhere, including internal wiring. SMF is infinitely scalable for future needs, multimode (MMF) is not. These days the cost differences for cabling and optics is negl…

Is there a best practice for which bidi direction to choose for which device type? i.e. I assume you don't want to just wing it for every link, so do people typically choose to use all A/B on the switch side, and all B/A on the desktop/server side? If I were walking into a business, not having setup their network, what direction would I expect to need on the desktop/server side?

Aren’t BiDi transceivers usually a good bit more expensive, especially compared to how low the material cost of fiber is? What’s your use case for BiDi? I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with this stuff, though. I can easily imagine BiDi being useful to retrofit/repurpose some existing fiber, since labor costs can be a lot.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#208

Post by culturestate »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #147
culturestate wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no need to have 10Gb in bedroom …until later in the home’s life when that bedroom is no longer a bedroom, for whatever reason. If you’re gonna do a project like this you might as well take it to its logical conclusion. It’s the same kind of advice I’d give to anyone who buys e.g. an iPad Pro - you might not think you need a cellular model right now, but that one time you do need it two years from now you’r…

That’s some very hypothetical talk. The master bedroom in a typical home is likely and forever going to remain a bedroom, at least if there is sufficient other space available in the home. If you buy a couple of iPads (you and your spouse or kids or whatever) and upgrade them every x years, springing for an extra $100 on each one every time adds up. You never need the cellular module, though it might be nice to have…

> there are always other, less convenient options (hotspot on phone, standalone hotspot, public Wi-Fi…

Until you’re driving, hypothetically, through rural Arkansas, where there's no Starbucks and your iPhone has juuuuuust enough signal strength to receive the WhatsApp telling you that you need to turn around a couple of slides but not enough bandwidth to download the deck.

Your iPad, though, for reasons known only to the black magic gods of RF design does have a stable-enough LTE connection and it saves your bacon with the large corporate client that dragged you to razorback country in the first place.

Hypothetically.

> You cannot take your mantra to its logical conclusion and apply it to everything, everywhere

There’s a reason I wrote iPad Pro. It’s not my mantra - it’s advice that applies to specific kinds of people in specific kinds of situations. The kind of people who have the means and motivation to run fiber throughout their house, for example.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#209

Post by yuvadam »

y04nn wrote: post #193

10 Gbps is really a game changer if you have large quantity of data to transfer (multiple terabytes), but 10G cards and equipment are power hungry so I only put out a dangling fiber one in a while to make a backup but the speed is appreciable. Also I'm still looking for a solution setup a ~200m link, Ethernet and WLAN are not an option, so I'm only left with fiber, 1Gbps would be sufficient, but I won't be able to do…

Any reason you can't use pre-terminated fiber?

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#210

Post by anonymousiam »

runjake wrote: post #5

This article is great overall, but there is some stuff you should do differently, if you're wanting to follow in the author's footsteps: 1. Just use UPC connectors everywhere unless you have really good reasons not to. 2. Use single mode fiber (SMF) everywhere, including internal wiring. SMF is infinitely scalable for future needs, multimode (MMF) is not. These days the cost differences for cabling and optics is negl…

I agree there's a lot of useful information in the article. Two things:

1) I question his choice of OpnSense vs. OpenWRT. I've found OpenWRT to be less demanding on the hypervisor/host, and quite scalable.

2) Not about the article, but about your comment on Chinese modules. I've tried Chinese 10Gb SFP+ modules and I've returned all that I tried. They would overheat, and they would not operate up to the specified data rates. The name brands cost twice as much, but they work.

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