During the course of the long Thanksgiving weekend, Ames and I managed to meet my employers for the first time in person, attend 3 Thanksgiving parties, do some Christmas shopping, assemble our Christmas tree (for the first time in our new house) and rearrange the home office. While Amy worked on the perfect configuration for our 2 desks, bookcase, futon, filing cabinet, and office accessories, I decided to work out the kinks in our home network.

Before:

Network: Before

Previously, I had the cable modem (top left) conntected to the uplink port on the Vonage router. I then used 3 of the 4 wired ports to connect the iMac, the PC, and the Printer/All-in-one. The 4th port was connected to the wall jack that I installed which runs under the house to the living room where it connects to our wireless router. The wireless router is connected to “The Box” (our little server/media center which is connected to the TV) and provides wireless access to Amy’s laptop.

I set this up before we picked up Amy’s laptop and the wireless router. It worked great at the time because The Box was in the same workgroup as the rest of the computers even though it was out in the living room. After we added the wireless router, getting into the box from the computers in the office became a major pain. I tried disabling DHCP on the router and setting The Box in the DMZ, but I still couldn’t get file and print sharing to work from the computers in the office.

After:

Network: After

By moving the wireless router into the office and connecting everything to the network through it (rather than the vonage router) file and print sharing is now so much smoother. We’ve had a wireless PCI adapter in the PC for a while, and since it’s now on the opposite side of the office, we decided to utilize that rather than running a long cat5 around the room.

New Furniture Layout:

Furniture Layout

Amy used Better Homes and Gardens’ Arrange-a-Room tool to create the new furniture layout. No, we don’t have pink office chairs, a blue futon, or white “server-room” tile in the office, but the little online tool saved us a lot of time.

So yea, even with the pretty Omni Graffle charts, and Amy’s furniture layout this is still quite possibly the most boring thing I’ve ever posted here. I don’t expect anybody to read this far into it or even find it useful. It’s really for posterity that I’m writing about our home network. You see, in a few months this network configuration will probably all change. In a few years I won’t even remember how I had things setup, and at some point I won’t even remember which computers we had when. I hope at that point that we will at least have flying cars or teleportation. Perhaps we’ll even have salmon flavored soda, USB beverage chillers or disappearing colored bubbles.