Hello, I just purchased my first house and it has a cabinet of spaghetti in the office and I don’t know what it’s for or how to use it. But it does look expensive so if I can make it useful to me then I’d like to!
Looks pretty straightforward, every cable appears to be labeled with a location. It looks messy, but that’s just the patch cables that probably need some Velcro to be tidied up. It appears to be phone lines, data lines, and cable hook ups.
Looks like you have two unmanaged switches patched in to your data patch panels. You’d need to hook up your router or modem to one of the switches (since they appear to be connected) and you’d have internet at each port.
Same for your cable, looks like they run to a coax splitter and one is labeled satellite, you’d either need to get new service to the satellite or get a service box installed and connected to the splitter for cable at each location.
Phone lines appear to run back to the garage. Need service turned on there for phones active in each room if you still use that.
If you called whatever your preferred service was to active a new account and you told them the house was already wired, they’d have no trouble setting you up.
Shit this sub is awesome! So just to make sure I’m understanding 100%. I should put in a new switch. And then when I instal my WiFi, I plug the router into any Ethernet port in the house, and then every Ethernet port in the house should be active??
Yeah. Most people on this sub would kill to move into that setup, btw.
This sub is my backup porn thread
Personally I’d rather have multiple connections to the router. If that’s a shelf in front of this setup, I’d be tempted to put the router there and give each switch it’s own connection directly to the router. With the switches currently there you’d replace the blue cable connecting them (port 8 on left, port 1 on right) with a cable from each to the router. It splits the maximum possible devices that would be competing for bandwidth to the router.
Of course if that’s a terrible place for the wifi then I’d do what you said.
On soho routers with a handful of ports, usually the ports are just switchports connected to one logical LAN interface anyway. Don’t think it’d make a difference.
If your house is big, consider setting up something like one of those mini computers with a router os like opnsense, and using wifi AP’s at the other ends of one or more of the cables. I have a used omada eap225 on the ceiling of my top floor and it covers the whole house. Benefit is if you want to upgrade to next gen wifi down the line you only replace the AP and reconfigure wifi passwords, and the rest of the network is unaffected.
I have a setup similar to this but in Australia the internet comes into the house via HFC (coax). Given that there are Coax outlets in every room, am I right in thinking that I plug in the router in a given room, and then all ethernet points will work?
What you’re looking for is a MoCA network. It won’t be cheap, but it is possible. You’ll need an adapter in every room you want wired internet, and high quality splitters. Setting up a Powerline network might be cheaper. But quality of that will be dependent on the quality of your electrical system.
Yes. Keep in mind the several ports that are plugged into the phone module (the middle module on the top set of three). You can easily turn those ports into ethernet ports by unplugging them from the telephone module and plugging them into a switch, but you’ll need more switch ports.
Yup.
You could even put a non-Wifi router inside that enclosure with the switch and then sprinkle access points around your home.
Hell 3/4 your job is done. Goldmine…
New switches, that support GB, locate router/ONT/Modem in this box, use the existing cables to distribute gige around the house. Same with the RG6 if you’ll use cable or satellite. Pick a mesh or wifi system and use the existing hard lines for wired back haul. Given the number of ports i suspect the house is decent size…
On the top section the middle is phone, if you won’t use that you can remove those jumpers from the center block.
When I moved into our place i had a cabinet like this 30+ Cat5e lines, about 1/2 unterminated, 1/4 phone, 1/4 ethernet, and the RG6 only 3 or 4 were terminated of about 20. No boxes labeled, and the wires about 1/10th had some magic marker scratching on them. Huge job to trace and locate each one, label, map out the locations, and re-terminate/organize.
This is an excellent capability of your new home, though you might need to hire the local computer person to help you get it sorted.
And it’s reasonably neat - there are people on here who expect these cabinets to be pristine with wires all straight and routed and shit – it works just fine with a LITTLE ‘spaghetti’.
First question is: what is your internet source and where is it – because it’s not in this box.
Second question: do you really need that many ethernet outlets activated around the house? If you don’t expect to use an outlet it doesn’t need to be connected. You can always change your mind later.
Third: as others have stated, the network switches at the bottom are out-of-date. Replacing the two with a modern 16-port switch will be a good idea as long as any new device you buy will physically fit in the space!
Again your whole house appears wired for both coax (television) and ethernet - and that’s fantastic! Decide what your goals are for this connectivity and then we go from there.
p.s. You will probably want to buy a mesh wifi network setup and use your existing wiring to connect each wifi transmitter back to the central mothership!
Damn that’s totally do want.
I used to have a Leviton box as my main network access point. I still haven’t taken it off the wall but I did replace it’s functionality with a nearby rack and gear from Ubiquiti. But right now, all this is working and while it looks like a spaghetti mess, it’s really important to understand that you bought a house that is already pre-wired for high speed internet to several rooms. If the wires are labeled, even better. If not, you can test them one by one using some of the techniques others have listed in this thread. But I would do nothing at first and plan what upgrades you would like to accomplish. Good luck.
Leviton switches? Those are probably managing your lighting through an app Find out wTf this is being used for because I doubt it’s just running wall jacks.
First get keystone jacks or other jacks and a patch panel. After that get a better switch. A switch with enough ports for the most important rooms. Then get short patch cables and patch the important rooms. And voila you have cleaned it up perfectly
You could replace switches with cheap 2.5gbe switches, and even if a room doesn’t have ethernet, you could use moca adapters, and leverage the coax cables for ethernet connections.
You’ll probs want to put your router and/or cable modem in there too.
I’ve been wanting to put one of these in, but I don’t know where I’d put it, and my attic is a pain in the ass to work in (I’d also be putting in the wiring).
10/100, lol
It should all work as is. I’d hook up a router to it and see. You can upgrade the switches at the bottom at your leisure if you need to. But if you just moved in you probably have 1001 other things to buy. 100mb switching is probably faster than your isp connection anyway.
change out the switch to a 10/100/1000 so can get faster speeds. POE is nice if you plan on using APs or Security cameras that has POE. You are lucky that the runs are actually for networking and not for phone lines.