https://s3-media2.fl.yelpcdn.com/bph...MR9sDsw/ls.jpg

--Ian

Gods dammit, Western Digital has discontinued the WDTV. And I now live in a place large enough that it's impractical to hard-wire everything with CAT5.

mesh network wifi and something else.

does your house have a basement/crawlspace?

Yeah, looking to wifi-to-ethernet bridges. Looks like there are a lot of very inexpensive solutions out there.

My bigger concern is what I'm going to buy to replace the WDTV when it inevitably dies in 10-20 years.

Negative on the basement / crawlspace. Homes in this nekkadawoods are built Florida style: slab-on-grade.

slab is the worst. no offense to any concrete guys on the site. :vash:

which WDTV do you have? I've got the live hub. Apparently there are wireless adapters that work with it... but... I've got a wired connection to it.

your future option might include plex and something like a TiVo or some other DLNA thingamabob like a fancy NAS that can serve media in some way.

bridges are slow.

House doesn't look that big in photos... Is it just that it's rented?

--Ian

Who here is using a smart home hub or combination of smart home hub-like devices?

More than just Echo and Home by themselves, but using them to control other shit...

Slab is... inconvenient.

I have two WDTVs. One is the WD TV Live, which has a built-in 1TB hard drive (ha) and is hardwire-only on the ethernet connectivity. The other is a 3rd gen unit with WiFi.

There's no immediate crisis, obviously. Just wondering what I'll replace them with in 10 years time when it become necessary. All the units on the market today talk about their ability to stream from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube, etc, but none of them seem to explicitly say "Yes, this box can mount a local Windows filesystem via the network and play video stored on it," which is really the only thing I care about.







Yeah, that, plus the fact that I've been living in 400-500 sqft apartments for the past decade. Being in a regular house is kinda freaky. Like, I keep forgetting which room I left the screwdriver in, etc.

Meh, how much space do you really need? I don't even fill up my 650sq ft apt and I'm about to buy a 3/4 bed house.

A TV, couch, chair, bed and clothes.

It's going to be hilariously empty.

What I meant was, "why not just run some cat 6 through the walls". If you're going to live there long-term, it's worth the inconvenience of patching drywall etc to get a reliable network, IMHO. If it's a short-term rental, OTOH, then that makes sense.

IMHO, wifi is for things that have battery power and are designed to be carried around. Anything that sits on a shelf/desk/etc and has a power cable designed to be permanently plugged in should use wired ethernet. It's much more reliable.

--Ian

Heh. Add two Ikea desks, an office chair, and a few bookshelves, and you've got my total furniture loadout. This place is way too big for me, and it's on the smaller side of "suburban normal." I got it because of the kitchen and the master bathroom. I've always wanted a bit of luxury in these two regards.



I'll probably be here a year, maybe two. By the end of that time, I intend to have either bought a house or determined that this job isn't for me and moved on.

In my past apartments, I have drilled sparingly, and also run cable along baseboards with gaffers tape. Here, that isn't an option. Due to the layout, there just isn't a path connecting the living room, the master bedroom, and the bedroom I've dubbed the office, without crossing multiple walkways. So I decided to put the modem and router in the office, as it's central to the layout and also the location of the "big" PC, and will use WiFi elsewhere.

I've done this before, with decent results. In my experience, if you use decent-quality hardware with modern drivers, WiFi can be a reliable point-to-point technology. Hell, in TV, we use WiFi to pump MPEG4 video between buildings downtown as an alternative to fiber. At WGN, I had WiFi paths (with directional antennas) between Sears and Hancock towers, Hancock and Tribune Towers, and Hancock Tower to the station uptown. Never had a problem.

^^ No crawl space in the attic joe?

I know this sounds weird, but there doesn't seem to be an attic. Or, to be more precise, there is obviously an attic, but I haven't found a way to access it.

There is an attic-like space above the garage, accessed via a conventional stairwell just off the main entrance, which is quite convenient as a way to store boxes and such.


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...0461e6c7d1.png

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...1b8f6a8528.png



And, for reasons which confound me, it contains stub-outs for plumbing as well as an unterminated 220v circuit. (No 220v service in the garage, but there is in the attic-like room above it. Who the hell designed this?)


https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...c91b829be6.png



But I'll be damned if I can find a hatch that lets me into the rest of the attic. The air handler is up there, so there must be some way of getting to it, but I haven't found it.

No crawl hole in the closet ceiling? Or outside on the gable end of the house? There's got to be a way, as code most surely requires an access point.

EDIT: where does that door in the wall of the 2nd pic go?

I have eyeballed every square inch of the ceiling which I can find, including all the closets. If there's an entrance, it eludes me.


That's not a door. You're looking at the backside of the blinds inside this window:

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...8f9ca4628c.png



Also, I just don't get Sean Penn. I mean, I seriously cannot think of a single* role of his which I really, truly appreciated.

Hmm, maybe you have 'guests' already. Reminds me of this old NIght Gallery episode:

What is on the wall opposite that window. Seems like there should be an access to the rest of the attic there. Maybe covered by insulation added later?

220v and plumbing -- sounds like the intention was to be able to make the attic above the garage into the laundry room.

My experience with wifi has been that you can get wifi to be 98% reliable, but that last 2% is elusive. Glitchy drivers, noise from neighbors, excessively complicated protocol stack, whatever it is it doesn't live up to the reliability of a simple cable going to a switch. But yeah, 1-2 years isn't worth going to a lot of effort to run wires.

Back when I was a student sharing a rental house with roommates, we used to run thinnet coax (10base2) around the interior perimeter of the house to connect all of our computers together. It had the advantage of being a bus topology, so we only needed to run one cable. We stapled it to the wall to get it up and around door-frames. Helped to be students and not really care about the aesthetics of black coax on the wall. :)

--Ian

My solution was pretty simple.
I drilled the outside walls and ran an ethernet cable up the outside wall and across the roof to the other side of the house.
Hide the cable in appropriate crevices, etc and fill holes with silicone, crimp a new male end on the cable, done.

Ha! We did exactly the same thing. Got pretty creative learning to snake it underneath carpets and such. This was the same house where we had four modems, on a Linux box, configured to make a bonded connection to four instances of TIA running on the VAX machine on campus. 33.6k x 4 = hella-fast dialup in a pre-DSL world. Here's a schematic:


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...836b6587c1.png


Rad.