Wireless Home Network

At the last post I talked briefly about the wireless site survey in networking projects.

Now I want to share my view in things that I personally consider in building wireless home network.
The following points are just my considerations, most home or SOHO users just plug their wireless access points, configure them and they just work fine.

Which Standard to Use

Currently there are four common standards for wireless networking, the 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and the latest one is 802.11n. These standards use unlicensed frequencies meaning they're all free for all to use.

You can use the frequencies for your wireless networks and you can't complain if your neighbors used up all of the frequencies available and interfere with your wireless signal.
Later on this when I talk about the wireless channels in a moment.

802.11a uses the 5GHz operational frequency and has a data rate transfer of 54Mbps. This standard is not too popular anymore because it has a higher frequency meaning it has higher data rates but with shorter range.
The higher the frequency also makes it more easily absorbed by solid objects around it.

802.11b and 802.11g use 2.4GHz operational frequency. Most wireless access points support both the b and g standards since they both use the same frequency they're both interoperable.
The difference is that the 802.11b has data rate transfer of 11Mbps while the 802.11g has 54Mbps.

The latest one is 802.11n, it uses 5GHz and/or 2.4GHz frequencies and in terms of data rate and wireless range, it has biggest data rate the widest range, some vendors claim their 802.11n access points can have data rates up to 114Mbps.

I don't know the truth about that since I don't have any 802.11n devices yet.
For me I just love the sleek looking design of 802.11n wireless router from Linksys.
Cool, gotta have that someday.

Wireless Access Points Locations

Place the access points in locations that you think can reach all the clients in the network. Consider the interferences from microwave oven or cordless phones.
Also keep in mind about objects that can block, absorb or reflect the signals from the access points such as thick wall or metal surfaces.

The further you get from the access points and the more objects standing between you and the access point, the lower data rate you'd get.

Channels to Use

If one wireless access point is enough to cover your clients, check on the wireless channels that are used by access points installed near your network.
If your access point uses the same channel as your neighbor's, they will interfere the wireless signals.
If you're using more than one access points, set them to use different channels.

In 802.11b and g standards, the common channels or the clean channels that you can use are channel 1, 6, and 11. Use one for each of your access point, do not use the same channel if the signals.
What I mean by clean channels is that these channels are not overlapping each other.
The following is the graphical representation of 802.11b and g wireless channels:

The 802.11a offers more clean channels for you to choose. You can see the wireless channels that you can use for 802.11a:


More on subjects on channels you can find directly at the source at the FCC site.

SSID

Service Set Identifier or SSID is like an ID for your wireless network. I'm sure you already know this, to join wireless network you need to know the SSID or you can scan for the SSID and join it.

You can use many available wireless network sniffers to scan the SSID and the wireless channels used by the wireless networks. Some of them you can find at the list here.
Once again not every sniffer works with your wireless network card, check on it before downloading.

You can use any SSID for your wireless network, your name, company name, etc. The reason I brought this up because if you're using the upper end wireless access points like from Cisco, you can have multiple SSID broadcasted from a single wireless access point.

Maybe you need a free for all SSID for your guests, another SSID for your home users or employees, and another one just for you as the admin.

In Cisco, you can tie these SSIDs to VLANs, this can give you flexibility in deciding different security for each SSID, different access list for them, etc.

Wireless Security

Now this is the most important part of all, the wireless security or the encryption method you want to associate with your SSID.
There are some types of wireless network authentication for security from the open authentication that you can apply for guests on your WLAN to the WPA version 2.
There are also WEP that is not so secure nowadays since people can tap on your signals and decrypt them.
Best to say that WPA or WPA2 are more secure to use in your WLAN, you can also use 802.1x security.

Remember that not all hardware or wireless NIC support all authentication, most of them support the WPA authentication so it's more common to use nowadays.

I got to admit I'm too lazy to give all explanation of them here plus this post takes longer than I expected.
Smarter and more diligent people have describe about this, one of them you can find at wikipedia.

I don't want to make you bore and start on the configuration of Cisco wireless network on the next posts.

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Planning for Wireless Network

If you're planning to deploy wireless access points in a networking project then I congrats you, you still have lots of works to be done before you get to configuring the access points .

There are lots of things to consider if you're in a networking project, the location of the access points, channels to use, are there radio interferences in the locations, etc.

You need to do wireless site survey in a network project, see they even created their own science for this work.

To talk about wireless site survey could take its own blogs, books, tools and even specialized certification if you want to do it properly and professionally.
The tools software and hardware don't come in cheap I'm telling you.

There are softwares that can do wireless site survey, they can visually show you the range of access points that are installed in the site. Few that I've seen in work before are from ekahau and visiwave.

On the top of this post is the sample report from visiwave and the left picture here is from ekahau.

These pictures show you the range of the wireless access points on site. They're kinda like heat meter or something. With these you can then determine the best placement for the access points that can reach all clients.

From my experience not all of these softwares work with your wireless cards, so keep in mind before purchasing these softwares, do they support your wireless cards or not.

There also hardwares that can help you do the site survey and these hardwares can also scan for radio interferences such as that come from oven microwave, cordless phones, etc.
You got to check on yellowjacket from bvssystem, these things are cool.

The people in bvssystem integrates HP iPaq PDA with their yellowjacket to be used as wireless site survey tool.
This one is in the form of Tablet PC for spectrum analysis:

Both softwares and hardwares can provide you with detailed reports of the wireless site survey result.

Now that's when you're working in a network project, if you want to deploy wireless access points in your home or SOHO, you don't need to do all that troubles.

Next post I want to talk about the things to consider if you want to install wireless access points in your home or SOHO.

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SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) for Cisco

When you've set up your Cisco devices, you might also want to monitor them. It's very inconvenient if you have to look at the lights blinking on your Cisco devices or logging to the devices and type in show ip interface brief just to see if the interfaces is running correctly.

To make monitoring network devices easier, the great people in network industry invented SNMP or Simple Network Management Protocol).

SNMP gives you great flexibility, you can allow a group of people to just monitor the network devices in your LAN (read-only rights) and allow other group for monitoring and making changes to the network devices (read-write rights).



The image above shows one of many networking tools that implements SNMP, this one if from solarwinds.
You can view in graphical form of CPU/memory usage, bandwidth usage, etc.

Some terms that you need to be familiar with in configuring SNMP:

GET

Gets are used to collect information from network devices, it's in a read-only mode. You need to configure a community string in a Cisco device so a network tool can identify it. Apply read-only rights so the users having this community string can only view information on network devices.

To set it in a Cisco device is very easy, just go to the global configuration mode and type in:

router (config)# snmp community public ro

The above command configure the router to have a community string of "public" with read-only rights.
You can also apply an access list to that community string.

Now that you have that community string, set this community string to the network tool so it can monitor the network device.

SET

The sets can be used to make changes to a network device such as shutting down an interface, etc.
Configuring sets is similar to the GET configuration, you only need to change the read-only rights to be read-write rights.

router (config)# snmp community private read-write

Since this command allows users who know the community string to be able to configure the network device, you should always apply an access list to the read-write command.

TRAPS

If the GETs and SETs are initiated by the admin, the traps are initiated by the network device itself.
This is very useful, in case an emergency situation pops out like an interface is shutdown, fan failure, etc. the device can immediately send message to a preconfigured destination.

Do this to send traps to host 192.168.1.10 with community string "public":

router (config)# snmp host 192.168.1.10 public

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TFTP Server for Newbies

TFTP or Trivial File Transfer Protocol can be a very useful network management tool. Although it's a simplified version of FTP, but because of that simplicity it wins the heart of all network engineers.


You can use TFTP server for numerous purposes when relating it with network devices.
You can use it for uploading or downloading Cisco IOS or other network vendors' operating systems, backup configuration files, or even run firmwares or operating system over the network for IP Phones, network devices, etc. without storing them in the devices.

I think most if not all of the professionally managed networks are definitely using TFTP servers.

I quoted from wikipedia about the details and features of TFTP Servers:

• It uses UDP port 69 as its transport protocol (unlike FTP which uses TCP port 21).
• It cannot list directory contents.
• It has no authentication or encryption mechanisms.
• It is used to read files from, or write files to, a remote server.
• It supports three different transfer modes, "netascii", "octet" and "mail", with the first two corresponding to the "ASCII" and "image" (binary) modes of the FTP protocol; the third is obsoleted by RFC1350.
• The original protocol has a file size limit of 32 MB, although this was extended when RFC 2347 introduced option negotiation, which was used in RFC 2348 to introduce block-size negotiation in 1998 (allowing a maximum of 4 GB and potentially higher throughput). If the server and client support block number wraparound, file size is essentially unlimited.
• Since TFTP utilizes UDP, it has to supply its own transport and session support. Each file transferred via TFTP constitutes an independent exchange. That transfer is performed in lock-step, with only one packet (either a block of data, or an 'acknowledgement') ever in flight on the network at any time. Due to this lack of windowing, TFTP provides low throughput over high latency links.
• Due to the lack of security, it is dangerous over the open Internet. Thus, TFTP is generally only used on private, local networks.

You can find many free TFTP servers in the internet, most popular ones are:

WinAgents TFTP Server
TFTPD32
SolarWinds TFTP Server
Kiwi CatTools - Network tools collection including TFTP Server

Personally I use the SolarWinds TFTP Server, don't get me wrong, every TFTP server you can find is easy to install and configure. I just use the one from SolarWinds because I have been using it from a very long time ago.

Up there in the post is the image of SolarWinds TFTP server when I used it to upload IOS image for recovery.

To use a TFTP server is fairly easy, just make sure your router can reach the computer you use for TFTP server, run the TFTP service in your computer, provide a space for placing your files to upload or download, and run the copy command from the router.

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Configure PRTG for Network Monitoring

You can find a lot of network monitoring software from the internet, and lots of them are free to use.

And of course you'd hear a lot that the best and reliable network monitoring softwares are running on the Linux/UNIX platform.

Luckily nowadays, many network monitoring softwares can run on Windows platform, I have nothing against Linux/UNIX system, but for newbies, learning about networking is hard enough, not to mention having to learn Linux/UNIX system.
But for a network engineer, knowledge about operating systems available in the market is a must.

For now, if you used to Windows platform, then it's easier to use network monitoring software such as PRTG.
It's very easy to install, in fact anyone whose ever installed softwares before can surely install PRTG.

So skip on how to install PRTG and start on configuring PRTG to monitor your network.

After installation, you can access PRTG from your system tray, by the way PRTG monitors your network all the time and informs you for anomalies in your networks.


Provide the correct username and password, you would then be taken to the PRTG main interface in your default internet browser:


Notice at the top of the view, you can see the Global Status Bar, it shows the summary status of the sensors that you applied for network monitoring.

The interface is very easy to use, click on the desired feature you want to set and you'd be provided with information on that feature. You can even right click and do some contextual features from that right click menu.

For now, I want to set PRTG to monitor my Access Point. I have a Cisco Aironet 1240AG in my network and I want to monitor the traffic going in and out of the interfaces/ports.

First go to the "Devices" menu and click the "Add new device"


It will take you to the next screen, you can create a new group for your network devices here or add the network device to the existing group, click on continue.


Fill in the information about the new device here, the device name, ip address of the device, tag to identify the device.
Next I just leave the Device Type option to default (Manual), and go straight to the Windows Connection menu.

Set up the username and password to access my Access Point, then at the lower menu, I set the SNMP Community String of the Access Point.
I already set the SNMP Community String to be publicSNMP.
SNMP or Simple Network Management Protocol is basically a protocol used to monitor status of network devices. SNMP will send out information about the status of the device in a set of time interval.
And the SNMP Community String is kinda like username and password so not everybody can see what information sent out.


Click again the continue button and you will be given a bunch of sensors that you can apply on the network device.
As I said, I want to monitor the traffic going in and out of the Access Point, so I click on the SNMP Traffic option.


Next screen is where you choose and apply the configuration of the sensor. Cisco Aironet 1240AG has Dot11Radio0 (802.11B/G), Dot11Radio1 (802.11A), FastEthernet, and the BVI interfaces.

I don't use the 802.11A so I'll choose the 802.11B/G and FastEthernet interfaces only.
BVI is a Bridge Virtual Interface, it summarizes all the interfaces of the network device so you don't need to remember different ip addresses applied to the interfaces, you only need to remember the BVI ip address and use it to access your network device.

At last you can see the status of the interfaces that PRTG monitors, it has text and visual view. I don't have many things going on in my network so you won't see many traffic here.


Easy to use isn't it, so happy

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PRTG - Network Monitoring Software for Your LAN

PRTG from Paessler is an easy to use network monitoring software for your LAN. In fact, it can be used for any network - LAN, WAN, WLAN, and even VPN.

Wow, talking about a great network management software, this one is definitely worth to try.

PRTG network monitoring software available in three different versions, the freeware version (yaayyy ), trial version and the commercial version.
They all different in term of features supported. For me, the freeware version is good enough to monitor my small LAN.

It doesn't need high hardware requirements to run and the great thing about this software is that it provides an easy to use installer.
Just grab the PRTG from www.paessler.com/prtg/download and run the installer.


Fill in and choose some options for the basic configuration and you're ready to monitor your network.

Using the PRTG, you'd hear a lot about Probes, Probe is one or more computers that actually do the network monitoring.
The reason you can have more than one Probe is that if one Probe fail, the other will take over monitoring your network.

PRTG also monitors the Probes' system health in your network, below is the graphical view of the Probe system health:


Next important thing in PRTG are sensors. PRTG freeware edition allows you to have 10 sensors in your network. One sensor monitors one single aspect of a network device. Some exampes (also mentioned in the PRTG manual) including:

• One network service such as SMTP, FTP, HTTP, etc.
• Traffic of one port in a network switch
• CPU or memory load
• One NIC traffic load
• One NetFlow Device (NetFlow is network protocol from Cisco used for collecting traffic information)
  
• etc.

Probes, sensors, and other objects in PRTG such as Groups, Devices, and Channels are shown in hierarchical view like this:


Network monitoring software such as PRTG is essential in networks, there are many reasons to use these kind of softwares.
You can monitor your network loads, analyze the traffic, and you get an instant notification if one of your network devices fail.

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But, My Laptop Has No Serial Port???

I reviewed about using console cable for connecting to your Cisco devices at my previous post, we know if we want to configure our Cisco devices for the first time we're going to need console cables.

Console cables have RJ45 connector at one end and Serial connector at the other end, the problem with this is that most of the newer laptops produced nowadays don't have any serial port.

Sure the laptops got smaller and lighter, but no serial port? This can be a slight problem for us, network engineers.

There's a way to get around this, we can use Serial to USB Converter cable. What this cable does is it converts your console cable serial connector so you can plug it to your USB port.

You can see at the image on the left is an example of Serial to USB converter cable, you can find many vendors produce this kind of cable.

To use it for your laptop is an easy work, all you have to do is install the driver, some cables can just work when plugged in, and sometimes you have to find the driver update first so it can work with your OS.

This happened to me once, I got my converter ready, did the correct parameters for connection but I can't connect to the router.
I search every possible cause for hours only to find that my converter driver need to be updated. So words of note, don't forget to download your driver update.

When you done with the driver installation, the installation window will tell you where is the converter located COM1, COM2, or other.
If not, you can look at your Windows Device Manager and point to the Ports (COM & LPT), there you can find the location of your converter.


I'm not sure if this is true, but whenever you move your usb converter to other usb port, it will change the COM port number.
Just to be safe, remember where you plugged the converter for the first time and always plug there.

Next, you can use the converter to connect to the routers/switches. I used HyperTerminal Private Edition for this example:


Give a name for the connection then choose the COM port of your converter from the Connect using drop down menu.
Make sure you have the following parameters set:

• Bits per second : 9600
• Data bits : 8
• Parity : None
• Stop bits : 1
• Flow control : None

Click OK and you're ready to go.

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9 Freewares for Your Cisco CCNA Home Lab

If you decided to build your own Cisco home lab, then I know you're going to need the following freewares for your LAN sooner or later.

These freewares I picked not because I think they're the best based on the functions but they are the ones I use in my home lab and what I think most handy for me.

By the way, I used the image above I found on the internet, if you click that image it leads you to a site where they held a freeware logo contest there, pretty cool.

Back again, I'll start with freewares that you can use to connect your PC to your Cisco Devices:

1. HyperTerminal Private Edition

Since Microsoft decided not to include hyperterminal in Windows Vista, you surely need this private edition version of HyperTerminal if you like the look of it.
You can use HT to connect to your Cisco Devices through serial connection or TCP/IP winsock.

2. Putty

Now Putty offers almost everything that you need for data communication, Telnet, SSH, RLogin, Serial Connection, proxy, anything, you name it.
One thing that I very much like from Putty is that I can change the font, color, the appearance of the Putty window.
I like to change it to be the matrix-like console, so I can get a "hacker" feel from it

3. TeraTerm

Now sometimes when given too much offers like in Putty, newbies can get confused. TeraTerm offers the solution between the HyperTerminal and Putty.
It has simpler design than Putty but flexibility to change user interface.

4. Solarwinds TFTP Server

If you're working with Cisco Devices, sooner or later you're going to need TFTP server. TFTP server is used to upload and download file to or from network devices.
You can use TFTP server to save your configuration files, backup your IOS, upgrade the IOS, store DHCP bindings if you're using your router as DHCP server, etc.

5. Kiwi Syslog Daemon

Syslog is used to receive messages from your network devices, and then display them in real time.
If you're using syslog in your LAN, you can find out immediately if your ports or devices are failing, and know exactly the errors are happening.
You can also use this Kiwi Syslog Daemon as an alert system, sending you email when one of the devices in your LAN is failing.

6. Cisco TACACS Server for Windows

This is not a software released by Cisco but more like a custom software based on Cisco source code.
If you don't know what TACACS server is, it is a server that stores your users' credentials such as user names and passwords.

If a user want to access something in your LAN, the TACACS server will check the credentials first before allowing the user to do something further.

The CCNA exam won't test you in configuring TACACS server, but it's fun to configure so try it out.

7. Wireshark

Now this baby is dangerous, you surely know Wireshark (previously named ethereal). It's a protocol analyzer, it can sniff, grab everything that running around in your network and view it.

No, I'm not telling you to sniff on your users data but Wireshark can be a very valuable learning tool for your exam.

You can use it to view what's going on behind the scene when you set up routing protocol or anything else in your LAN, see what things are transferred, see how they interact, etc.

8. PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG Network Monitor from Passler is a powerful network monitoring solution you can used to monitor your network devices, not just Cisco devices, it gathers all your devices' status and display them in graphical report.


There are other tools you can use to monitor your LAN, you can see a list from Cisco, what they recommend for monitoring Cisco devices here:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/732/Tech/nmp/netflow/partners/freeware/index.shtml

9. Tenable Nessus

If you want to scan your network for vulnerabilities, you can use Tenable Nessus. It's not exactly necessary for Cisco Devices since you're in control of what ports you're using for your network devices, but you can use Nessus for scanning your users' machines.

More on this you can find at my previous post.

Well, that's it the freewares that you can use in your home lab, there are vendors that produce an all in one solutions for your network such as Solarwinds and Kiwi, of course you have to pay for the advanced version.

This is fun, I found other tools when researching for this post, think I'll use it in my network and share it with you next time.

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Alternate Firmware for Your Routers

Have you ever got the feeling that your routers don't give you enough power to give you all the goodies that a network can offer though you've spent a quite good amount of money on them?

Or maybe you just want to do something else interesting with your routers, not just leave them there doing all the routing for you.

Well, routers, typically with the linux based OS can be upgraded using a third party or alternate firmware.
Those routers including the picture I show you, the WRT54G series that are often used for home local area network.

Of course you only want to replace the firmware of your home routers, not your Cisco routers .

With alternate firmware you can do some cool stuff, such as

• Firewall feature
• IPv6 feature
• Site survey using your router
• Syslog support
• QoS (Quality of Service)
  
• some even support VLAN
• and many other good stuff

There are many alternate firmware available in the internet, the paid and free ones, some of the good ones:
OpenWRT
DDWRT
Tomato Firmware
Sveasoft

Each of the firmware is unique, they have different features and support many different routers like linksys, buffalo, belkin, corega, asus, and pretty much all home usage routers in the market.

Just make sure your router is listed in the supported hardware of the alternate firmware, and it has the specifications required to run the firmware, such as the flash memory, ram, etc.

Some firmwares offer graphical interface for the configuration and some others provide only the command line style configuration.

So if you need more features on your routers and geek enough to do it, upgrading the firmware to alternate firmware is awesome.
Is it safe to do this, I would not say it is, but firmware like this is supported by many developers and used by many people, try research first before deciding to upgrade.

Cheers

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Subnet Calculator

One of the biggest challenges to design your local area network and for taking the CCNA exam is calculating subnets.
Actually to calculate subnets is quite easy but it can be confusing for networking newbies. And luckily there are many tools out there that can help us in this problem.

One of the tools is Boson Subnet Calculator, you can download this tool for free from Boson. This thing is very handy, it can calculate subnets, find out which subnet an address belongs to, do a wildcard checking, and have a Decimal IP Calculator.

 

 The only thing you need to do to find what addresses belong to a subnet is just insert the IP address of a computer to the Host IP and slide the Mask bit to match your subnet mask.

As the above picture, I typed in 172.16.10.5 and subnet mask of 255.255.248.0. Immediately I know what addresses for that subnet, you can see them at the Current Host Range.

This tool also valuable to learn subnetting since it shows how it calculates the subnet, recommended for companion to pass CCNA exam.

Too bad you can't use this at the CCNA exam.

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Scan for Network Vulnerabilities

Tenable Nessus from http://www.nessus.org is the tool of my choice if I want to scan my network for vulnerabilities.

Say like this, I want to know if my network is safe from dangerous people that want to mess up my network, I need to know are there any "holes" that can be an advantage to those people. So I run my tenable nessus from my PC, scan all computers in my network, and the nessus will provide me details of all vulnerabilities.
They'll also give you the details of each vulnerabilities, which ports are currently open, what's the meaning of it, is it dangerous, the links to the description, etc.

To start trying nessus is very easy, first you can download it for free from http://www.nessus.org/download/, get your activation code free for home usage, and start installing it.

 

This is the look of your nessus once installed, you can start by clicking on the "Start Scan Task" button to start scanning vulnerabilities.

  

Enter the hostname or the IP address of the computer you want to scan.

 

The above information will be given to show you the status of the scan.

And last you will be given the result of the scan in html format, below is the example of the report:

 

I highly recommend that you use nessus to scan for vulnerabilities in your network, it also gives you some info about the network, for newbies, you can learn about ports, which port is used for what.

Happy scanning. 

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Home networking basic tools - Part 3

Okay, now you got your cable and crimping tools ready, you also know the tools you need to run the cables inside your walls, then all that you need to have for your home networking tools is cable tie.

What?!? why would I need cable ties. Yes you don't actually need cable ties to do home networking, but you do need them to make your cabling neat.



Making your cables neat



If you're running a whole lot of bundles of cables in your home, cable ties definitely things of your choice to neat your cabling work.

What people usually use are these following types of cable ties:

The one on the left is the velcro cable type, and the next one made of plastic or something (well, kinda plastic-like material)



You can use any one of those two, the difference I may say is the velcro is definitely more expensive than the plastic cable ties.



And also, the velcro cable ties are usually preferred for managing sensitive cables such as fiber optics cables. It's because the velcro type ties are not giving too much pressure on the cables, which is very important for cables like fiber optics.



The picture on the right shows you the velcro cable tie used to manage a bundle of fiber optics patch cords/cables.

Yup, they're all orange, good for the eyes, I mean if you're long enough working on network installation, at some points you'd be very very sick just seeing a LOADS of grey UTP cables. Ah yes, UTP cables do come in various colors nowadays.



Sometimes if you use plastic cable ties, you know when you got too excited, you might tied the cables too tight which maybe cause some cables cut in the middle.



This happened to me once, I was sure I crimped the cables right and it took me quite a while just to figure out that my tie was causing the problem.

Thanks to the Fluke Meter I had, I could know that some cables are cut at the point I tied using cable tie.





I hope this is informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

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Home networking basic tools - part 2

Running your cables inside walls, that's what I wanted to title this post but since I want to make these posts related, oh so be it.



So you have your basic networking tools for crimping ready, now you're thinking you don't want the cables to be crossing around everywhere in your living room.

You can hide your cables by running the cables on the ceiling then go into the walls and eventually pop-out on the walls.

You can use the following toolkits:

From left to right:



Modular Jack

Instead of RJ45, you should terminate the UTP with modular jacks if you want to run your cables in walls. These jacks can then act just like your phone connection on the wall.

They come in various of colors, and cost probably about US$ 3 or less.



Wall Faceplate

 From the modular jack, you can put them in these faceplates. The faceplate holds still the modular jack on the wall. Then you can screw the faceplate to the wall.



Punch Tool

Different from the RJ45, you use different tool to terminate UTP cable to the modular jack. You can use punch tool (US$ 45 or less) to punch each cable in the UTP to the jack. The jack has the color code printed and usually different between vendors so no need to worry getting the wrong cable terminated to wrong place.

In practice actually you can use just about anything to punch down the cables to the jack - your fingers, scissors, etc but do be careful not  to scratch the cables - then cut the excessive cables to prevent crosstalk.

Lucky, some vendors produce jacks that don't need to be punched, they cost more though.



There you have it if you have more time and energy, you can run your cables inside the walls.

The main problem is it should be hard if you if you don't have extra holes in your walls and usually they run pipes/conduits to get the cables from the ceiling to the walls.



You can always use these cable raceways:



These raceways can be planted on the walls, nice and neat but cost quite much per meter.

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Home networking basic tools - part 1

I want to show you how easy it is to set up your own home networking, you don't need an expert to do this work.

First let me show you all the basic tools needed to do this.



Cables and crimping tools

 

 From left to right, you can see in the picture:



UTP Cable

UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair) is the widely used cable for networking,  you can use other cables though but UTP and the networking cards are easier to get and configure.

UTP is basically 4 pairs of cables (8 cables) with different colors to identify them, twisted together to prevent the crosstalk or interference when transmitting signals.

The picture is the type of cable if you buy in bulk, it contains 305m or 1000feet of cable, you can also buy them per meter.

Currently there are Cat5, Cat5e, and Cat6 cables. What differentiate them are the bandwidth that they can deliver.

Typical cat5 cable can deliver about 100mbps.

The Cat5e is an enhanced version of the cat5 cable, they can deliver up to 1000mbps, but most I've seen can't reach 1000mbps speed, the cables cost less than US$85.

Cat6 cable able to deliver 1000mbps and up, these are new cables and cost more than US$100 per box (305m).

The networking people (EIA/TIA) are now designing for the Cat6a and Cat7 cables but they won't release it in the near future.

I would recommend using the Cat5e but if you can afford it, use the Cat6 cable.



RJ45

This is the connector that you put on the ends of the cable, there are 8 pins each connected to each cable in the UTP.

There is a standard that you must apply for terminating the UTP cable to RJ45. I'll post later for how to work this out.

You can buy a pack of them, 50 pieces with about $15 or less.



Crimping Tool

With this tool you can crimp - this is the term for terminating - the UTP cable to RJ45 connector. Usually they provide the stripping tool along or built-in the crimping tool. Stripping tool allow you to strip the cable's jacket. They cost about US$30 or less, but you can find the cheaper one only for US$10.



I want to include NIC or Network Interface Card in this list but nowadays the pcs or laptops usually have built-in NIC or even wireless card. The NIC is where you connect the UTP cable (which has been crimped with RJ45) from the computer to switch/router.



Hope this is useful for you, thank you.

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