Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Networking questions....

Although I already have too much on my plate at the moment, I'm stupidly going to attempt to finally get a network set up here. I've had the guy that handles all of the networking for the Boston-based Coast Guard fail at it, as well as the guy that builds all my edit systems. But both of those were several years ago and I'm hoping new equipment, Windows 7 and a fresh start will have it working.

I plan on scrapping any and all old settings (though I haven't researched how to "undo" past settings if that's necessary) and start from scratch. Comcast sent me an updated modem and they keep calling to wonder why I haven't installed it yet (I think they're concerned that I sold it in a back alley). I'm ordering a Linksys e4200 that will be here Monday and I'm going to set it all up through my Photoshop computer which is Win7 Pro (though I will still be adding some Vista and even a couple of XP-Pro machines if they cooperate).

In my office, I have four hardwired computers and a network-capable, non-wireless color laser. In my home theater rack, I have seven items to network...all wired. I have two other laptops in the house for which I would like to have wireless available.

So, the questions: Is there likely to be any problem feeding two switchers off a consumer wireless router in a setup as outlined below? There are wireless routers with more ports, though they're expensive and uncommon. Am I asking to much for this wireless router..i.e., should I be looking for higher-end business solutions?

The Linksys wireless router in the middle of it all is the thing you need to worry about, but it should be able to handle at least 16 unique devices without a problem. I've not heard of a consumer device with such a low limit in *ages*.

It's good that you have a switch dedicated to your office computers. When they're talking to each other and not to the internet they won't even need to send traffic to the upstream wireless router. If it's not a gigabit router you may want to look into it if you often send files between computers. (The computers will also need gigabit ethernet adapters to take advantage, though.)

Everything looks good. Do your devices currently use dhcp to get the ip addresses? If so, everything might "just work" with the new setup.

Peter, thank you so much for your post and the information!

That router is gigabit capable, and at least two of the office computers are as well (The Photoshop and video editing computers). I'm not sure about the others, though those two computers would likely be the only ones sharing large files anyway. That little 5-port Linksys switch is NOT gigabit capable. Good catch, I'll order a second Trendnet TEG-S80G for the office systems.

I have no idea yet what has dhcp or not, except to say that all of the components in the HT have, at one time or another, gotten on the web for firmware updates and such, (though it's been sporadic) and I've never had to manually enter an IP address. So, in hindsight, I guess they do!

Looks fine to me--Peter's Gig-E concern is the only thing that jumps at me, and you look like you've got that covered.

Thank you, Ken. I really appreciate both you and Peter taking a look!

Word of warning: i think my e4200 corrupted my wd my passport 500 gb USB drive and their are others with similar stories on the Cisco forums. The router won't recognize either of my hard drives since the latest firmware update and the media server has never worked properly. I'm happy with the performance of the router in every other way, I just use my PC for a media server and share the hard drive on my network through it. However, this means my PC must always be on...

I think Mark has a dedicated NAS, so he wouldn't be using the USB drive option with the 4200.

Actually, I don't have a dedicated.... though I've looked into it and don't mind going that way.

The "NAS" on my chart was actually going to be a USB drive, (since I have so many lying around!) so thank you David for the warning!

Many people are having no issues at all, just be careful what you plug in and make sure it is backed up!

Also, I use the same trend net switch (5 port version) for my AV components and it works great. My trendnet switch is hooked into a trendnet 450mb/s ethernet adapter and is not directly wired to the e4200.

Mark I thought you had a DROBO?

I am running an 8 port switch for all my HT stuff, Wii, Xbox, BR player, Denon 3808 etc. which feeds down to my Netgear 3700 router. I also have a second 8 port switch feeding into the Netgear router. This switch links the rest of the house computers and my NAS together as well as feeding them the internet from the router.

I should write out my network sometime. And also put in that Cisco firewall I've got lying around. Then it will be truly absurd... 3 devices with switches built in in a room with one other piece of network equipment. Everything else goes in other rooms.

Jason, I questioned a DROBO at one point, but I can't seem to get past the very mediocre...even poor...reviews. I feel like I would never fully trust it's reliability, and if you can't do that, what's the point?

I wonder about a NAS with redundancy RAID, though... even though I'm likely to keep my photos local on my Photoshop computer. It might be great for music streaming to my Denon or for casual, personal photos.

My game plan is to transfer ALL of my photos (from the last 12 years of being digital) onto an extra 2TB internal drive I mounted on my PS computer, and index them all with keywords in LightRoom as I go along. Once they're indexed, I can offload the majority of them onto two separate external drives which I'll keep off-premises in two different locations. I just bought a 64GB USB 3.0 stick for doing the transferring.

Only then, will I feel updated, organized and secure as far as they are concerned.

Unfortunately, as with many other things, it's such a huge job and requires enough concentration that I can't simply do it "10 minutes here, 10 minutes there". And again, with so many other things in my life, it's not getting done because I'm too busy treading water just to keep my head above the water than to make any progress towards reaching the shore.

I just pray that I don't have a hard drive failure in the meantime, but that's crazy and pointless because I'm an atheist!

Mark, your plan looks fine. The e4200 will be able to handle all the devices without at problem. It is the high end consumer model with quite a bit of horsepower. Using switches to add more end-points is the way to go, rather than looking for an expensive router with more ports. I have three switches in my house.

As David pointed out, some USB-connected hard-drives have had a problem with the latest e4200 firmware. I am sure this will be fixed in a future firmware update, but always have your data backed up.

If you want to go with a dedicated NAS, you can buy a BYOD model and extract the disks from all your USB enclosures and use them in the NAS. Just check that they are all SATA connectors inside. I would recommend a NAS from QNAP.

For the wireless connections you want to try and place the e4200 so that the signal covers the house nicely. I have an almost-dead spot in my house, and when I move the router the dead-spot moves to somewhere else. It is very annoying in this age of smart-phones where you expect to have coverage even in the bathroom.

If you want me to stop by and help, just say the word. It's easier to spot/prevent issues on location than via a forum. :-)

Henry, thanks so much for the information and the offer but be careful.... I might take you up on it!

BYOD? Buy Your Own Drive?

I am expecting you to take me up on the offer!

Yes, BYOD = Buy/Bring Your Own Drive. Most of the QNAP devices are sold this way.

I'm really enjoying my ReadyNAS NVX. Expensive, but it's got a lot of nice features and a fairly active community building add-ons. Favorite feature so far is the TiVo archiving. It's a little rough, but it's nice to not worry about capacity any more.

I'm happy with my Synology NAS, but I didn't look in-depth at the other options. It's doing what I need it to. Still, I'll probably upgrade to one with more drive bays at some point.

Since I need to have 3-4 desktops running around the house anyway, is there ANY sense in me using an NAS rather than just throw some more shared storage into one of the existing machines?

Hmmm. Even though I almost always have my computer on when I'm home, in addition to my NAS, I still like having the NAS around as the central backup for the network and having my media ready to stream in the instances when I do power my computer down. The sharing seems like less of a headache overall, too. With the DLNA and innate transcoding, it's kept me from having to deal with a lot of software and settings work on my Windows machine. Still, there's more I could do with my NAS that I just haven't been curious enough to try yet. I could probably get even more out of it. But yeah, they can be expensive, so throwing more space into an existing machine would certainly be the cost-effective solution.

UH-oh..... BYOD GTG at Mark's!!!!!

C'mon down, gentleman. You can help with current projects. I'll post in a different (new) thread shortly.

I'll beer all of you.

Well, you can run some of those services on a NAS--for example, the ReadyNAS has a Plex server available and a DNLA server built in.

I use the old standard DNS-323 for my NAS and I have it hacked to run Twonkymedia Server, which I prefer to the built server that Dlink provides.