This article is great overall, but there is some stuff you should do differently, if you're wanting to follow in the author's footsteps:
1. Just use UPC connectors everywhere unless you have really good reasons not to.
2. Use single mode fiber (SMF) everywhere, including internal wiring. SMF is infinitely scalable for future needs, multimode (MMF) is not. These days the cost differences for cabling and optics is negligible. In fact, SMF cabling is often cheaper than MMF. And no, you generally won’t have to worry about attenuating signal.
Also, in my extensive experience, FS.com optics modules are typically better manufactured and more reliable than OEM modules.
I resisted the "cheap chinese" modules for a long, long time, but then discovered that most of my uplink carriers used them.
It's been years now. I've had many Cisco OEM, Dell OEM, and a couple from another 3rd party manufacturer go bad, but I have yet for one FS.com SFP to go bad. I've got several hundred deployed in a wide variety of environments, from great (cool, clean areas) to bad (hot, dirty areas).
Fiber is, as runjake mentioned, very very cheap. The raw cost is less than copper, and that is part of why I ran so much of it in my build. (I am not the OP). I did however include some multimode in that equation only because some AV equipment uses is, and not all of them use replaceable optics modules.
I would strongly agree that if you are running fiber, run single mode everywhere. It is amazing how far singlemode fiber can go compared to copper if you are willing to spend money on the endpoints.
What kind of equipment outlay was necessary if you don't mind my asking? I.e. the splicer the OP bought seems a bit expensive and impractical to own compared to an ethernet crimper, etc.
I had a hard time finding UPC wall outlets since most that are available in the Swiss format are for FTTH use, so they all have APC LC connectors on them. The keystone versions are available as UPC but they lack any fiber routing in the back.
My setup is much simpler - I get 25Gbit/s from init7 to Mikrotik CCR2004 https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs and then distribute it to 2x1Gbit access points, and use the other SFP28 port to power my PC (in another room) via the Intel E810 card.
I use the Feller fiber extension cable (20m) and bought some cable puller to pull the fiber via the plastic piping, and then finished it with the Feller outlet. Looks rather clean :) Photo: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FWhHwD0WAAIb3Dt?format=jpg&name=...
PS: ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs is barely coping with 25Gb/s routing. It can do it, but for multiple TCP sessions, a single one chokes the router at something like 20Gbps (down), 15 Gbps (up).
Which is why I'm so annoyed that my employer (which happens to be the largest employer in my entire state) mandates a vendor that costs 6x as much and whose products fail much more often.
I agree there's a lot of useful information in the article. Two things:
1) I question his choice of OpnSense vs. OpenWRT. I've found OpenWRT to be less demanding on the hypervisor/host, and quite scalable.
2) Not about the article, but about your comment on Chinese modules. I've tried Chinese 10Gb SFP+ modules and I've returned all that I tried. They would overheat, and they would not operate up to the specified data rates. The name brands cost twice as much, but they work.
Good advice. I’ve had the same policy with regard to SMF vs MMF for quite a while now, when I saw each new speed dropping in distance with multimode. You just know SMF will do what you need.
We’ve been using the FS modules too for years, they are very reliable. It does totally make a mockery of the vendors who claim they need to lock out other brand’s modules (from their 100% standardised port) for reliability etc.!
3rd party and maybe 1-2 of each type from the vendor (used to show their support that the 3rd party transceiver isn't the problem) is what we usually buy, basically an open secret. Though I've seen 97% off the price for vendor optics, still more expensive than 3rd party
And given some of the inexpensive single mode fiber spools are two fibers, it is probably easier to just have two fibers instead of trying to do 2 wavelengths.
And to be clear, there will be hacks that scale MMF a bit, but it’s not really “infinitely” scalable due to relatively poor attenuation and light mode. Keep in mind, there isn’t one MMF spec, there’s many: eg. OM1 through OM4
> I resisted the "cheap chinese" modules for a long, long time, but then discovered that most of my uplink carriers used them.
MSP ISP here, we just rock the FS optics combined with an FSbox to code them as required. ;)
Just a warning for the weary: don't put a non-Fiberstore optic in their FS coding box -- you'll lock your account for a week. Ask our field team how they know this.
Is there a best practice for which bidi direction to choose for which device type?
i.e. I assume you don't want to just wing it for every link, so do people typically choose to use all A/B on the switch side, and all B/A on the desktop/server side? If I were walking into a business, not having setup their network, what direction would I expect to need on the desktop/server side?
Aren’t BiDi transceivers usually a good bit more expensive, especially compared to how low the material cost of fiber is? What’s your use case for BiDi? I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with this stuff, though. I can easily imagine BiDi being useful to retrofit/repurpose some existing fiber, since labor costs can be a lot.
I can't speak for anyone else, but we wing it for every link. When we light up a new link, we grab a matched pair, randomly select one to put in the switch, and then put the other one downstream.
I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls.
I'm currently in the process of literally tearing down walls in my old house (built in the 40's). I used to fear smashing into walls. Once you do a bit of drywall and mud yourself, you realize it isn't that big of a deal. Everything I've learned has been off YT videos and there are some excellent channels with all of the professional tips and tricks. It isn't rocket science by a long shot.
I’ve done a lot of drywall work and I still avoid it whenever possible.
Doing basic drywall and paint isn’t rocket science, but getting a professional level fit and finish actually takes a lot of practice and experience. It’s also a completely different experience when you’re trying to match old specialty paints from a previous homeowner, blending repairs to match the wall texture, and other complexities that don’t show up in those basic YT videos. If you’re in a situation with untextured walls, known paint colors, simple repairs, and a forgiving eye, then it’s really not bad, but the complexities can add up quickly.
Even in the best cases, cutting into drywall all across the house to pull wire would be a project I’d try to avoid at all costs in an occupied home. The fast path still requires multiple days to go through all of the drying and re-application cycles to build up all the right layers, not to mention dust control to keep that fine dust out of everything you own.
Yep, this was one of my great enlightenments: no matter how good or professional a wall looks, it's really just drywall mounted on wood, some cracks sealed, and then painted over.
When the walls are off in the house is the best time to get anything done. Sometimes I don't even want to put the walls back on- for example, an unfinished garage with exposed studs is very convenient.
I had a (small) fire in the wall of a house in about 2000. Turned out the rubber insulation had fallen off the wiring, in various places there were just pairs of bare copper wires. An electrician friend helped me rewire, and we layed in cat5 and conduit (between storeys) at the same time. Rewiring a house from the 1840s required pulling up floorboards, but no significant work in the walls.
I'm not sure whether older houses are more maintainable by default, or just once you have rocked over some threshold of continuous occupancy, there there are sufficient layers of repair and rework that you just stop worrying about (for example) sawing through a floorboard. While I didn't have to mess with the walls, if I had, I'd just have torn down the existing plaster and redone it, like you say it's not that big of a deal
I agree it isn't rocket science, but plastering if one of those things best left to professionals, much more so than plumbing or electrical for instance. They usually make near minimum wage, are just so much faster and produce a better result.
I've started plastering a few of my walls and after wasting a couple days doing a few square meters ended up hiring a couple guys to do the rest of the house. There is just no comparison in value.
We had our loft converted last year, and after watching the builders construct the partitioning walls, I think I would probably manage that. We also had to have some walls removed and re-built and made the house too dusty for the kids to be around. This house is an old English terraced house, and lots of the non-retaining walls are wooden lath and plaster, with horse hair mixed in for good measure!
While it's not rocket science, I always find it to be super annoying to do. Getting things smooth/flat when you're done (generally, I think I wind up doing 4-5 layers of mud) takes a fair amount of time. Plus sanding it down without getting the powder everywhere is difficult; I use a wet sander / sand "sponge", but even then I wind up with some of it spreading around.
Unless your walls are plaster on lathe. Hah we took 150 large bags of rubble out of the apartment last week. No, it wasn’t a gut reno, just 2 walls and 2 closets.
> I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls.
I don't own a house and have never owned a house. This will probably sound stupid and I am sorry if this is something obvious.
Is it that my spouse will leave me or my parents will disown me if I run a conduit just hanging on a wall? What is this obsession with hiding all wiring within the drywall? What am I missing here?
Not that I have a leg to stand on because I still can't afford to buy a home outright (and at current rate, never will). I live in an apartment and I don't make any changes to it. I cannot even imagine doing something simple like drill a hole on the door for a doorbell. So, I am definitely hypocritical when I say this. Maybe I am just being salty as a non-home owner. I feel like all of this comes from treating our homes as some kind of liquid asset that we must keep in pristine condition at all times so we can stage it and sell it at a moment's notice.
If you own your own home, why not live in your home like you own your home? Run that conduit across all the walls (and through inside door frames or something like that if you must). If not, do you really own your own home? Why not just live with housing insecurity like I do?
It sounds like you just have different priorities or a different aesthetic sense than folks like me who go to great lengths to hide cables.
To me it just feels good to wake up in a visually simple environment with things out of sight. It feels like magic, in a good way, to be surrounded by performant, reliable and useful technology but to be able to see almost none of it. And I have an automatic negative reaction to visual clutter or conspicuous machinery in my house.
I don't see anything wrong with your way of thinking. I can't easily change how I feel about it and I see no reason why either of us should have to.
Edit: this makes me think about sci-fi spaceships. Battlestar Galactica vs. the Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker's Guide. One has its conduits and controls run every which way and the other is minimalist to a fault. I like them both but would definitely prefer to wake up every morning in the latter!
3/8” flex isn’t surface raceway, it’s used for connecting a rigid (EMT/IMC/RMC) conduit system to a vibrating piece of equipment like a motor or transformer, among other things.
There are probably residential raceways that blend in better, but I’m not familiar with residential construction.
There are plenty of ways to get a cable from point A to point B inside of a wall, particularly if you have a single story home with an unfinished attic and basement. A spade drill bit, a fish tape, and a multitool/rotozip can get a cable pretty much anywhere if you can drill a hole into the wall cavity from above or below.
A friend of mine lives in a building with concrete floors above and below, all his wiring runs through plastic, surface-mounted, trunking and it is aesthetically disgusting.
I’m an avid DIYer and have no problem buying others’ high-standards DIY work, inspection/permits or no.
If I walked into a listing and saw surface raceway everywhere, I’d only bid what I was comfortable paying leaving room for a gut rehab. It’s evidence of a high level of DGAF at a minimum and likely isn’t the only place that corners were cut.
Do I understand correctly you're proposing to just run it on the outside of walls/ceilings? How would you ever again close doors that it needs to go through?
My aesthetic requirements are basically zero (to the dismay of my partner indeed; we meet in the middle) but I do want to be able to practically use the apartment still.
> I feel like all of this comes from treating our homes as some kind of liquid asset that we must keep in pristine condition at all times so we can stage it and sell it at a moment's notice.
This seems like you are missing the point. The REASON that having a conduit hanging on the wall lowers the home value is because it looks bad and ruins the aesthetics… for both the current home owner and a future home owner. The reason the person buying the house would pay less is the same reason me, the current home owner, doesn’t want it… it looks bad.
I understand that some people don’t care about aesthetics at all (I am probably closer to that end of the spectrum than most), but you also have to realize that people care about how their home looks for more reasons than just resale value. Do you think the whole world only makes their houses look nice in case they want to sell?
I wouldn't run conduit on my walls and around doors because I would think it looks awful. People's aesthetics are different. If yours (and those of anyone else who might live with you) allow for such a thing, then sure, go for it.
> I feel like all of this comes from treating our homes as some kind of liquid asset that we must keep in pristine condition at all times so we can stage it and sell it at a moment's notice.
Well, you aren’t wrong. This is exactly the thinking behind that.
The other response is correct that it’s nicer to have it all covered up though. I guess it comes down to a bit of perfectionism. If I stick everything on the walls I will always feel like there is work left to do.
That said, our living room is still (3 years in) a mess of (nice, not industrial) on-wall conduits.
Imagine going up or down a floor. Really hard to do on top of existing walls, pretty easy with conduits in walls.
For this house, the easiest way to pull wires from one end of the house to another (after the original construction) is to first go down into the crawl space, cross horizontally there, then go up again.
We do have some conduit in place to run cables. One running up to a wall-mounted TV, and another running Ethernet up in to the loft. I don't mind the one under the TV, but I wouldn't like to use it for everything.
Don’t mean to be sexist but in my personal experience wives would consider cable conduit across a nicely painted wall in a nicely decorated room a hard no.
One interesting technique I have seen with fiber is running it along/behind baseboards in old houses. Since it is very small (and you can get even smaller single mode fiber) it can in some cases run along side. Some people remove the baseboard and put it behind it. It creates some routing issues, but might also solve some.
This is one of the things that my father did when he did the wiring for the house ~50 years ago - conduit everywhere. It means things like drilling into the wall is safer (you hit metal rather than wire) and when you want to, you just pull more wire through it.
There are so many parts of it that were "over engineered" for a house 50 years ago that are "oh, that's convenient" now.
Agreed. In most US homes, by code, there needs to be a fire-stop between floors but also for practical reasons there are often cross-bracing mid way up each wall, therefore going from one place to another often involves multiple holes in drywall (which is relatively inexpensive, but also a dusty/annoying nightmare to patch).
If I built a home I'd add conduit, but that's an extremely niche idea.
A flexible drill bit[1] can be used to pass a horizontal member within a wall. You can enter the wall through an outlet hole or use the length of the bit to drill straight up through bottom of the wall, if you’re able to access it from a basement. They usually have a hole in the tip to pull twine along with the head of the bit.
I've watched the video and I still don't understand how you get the wire through the conduit though. Part of the video seemed to happen through telekinesis: the part where a wire magically came out of the wall, allowing you to pull from the other side.
You have to have a wire installed in the first place(i.e coax or just a simple thin but strong wire). That wire is installed when you install the walls/gypsum. Then you use it to pull whatever you need(hdmi etc). When you pull the new wire(hdmi) you attach an additional wire at the tip so that you can pull back your initial wire once your new HDMI is in place.
If you don't have an initial wire installed you can use a magnet kit with a specific wire to pull it through the conduit.(e.g youtube "magnepull"). A camera small comes in handy as well.
If you need to pull wires through the ceiling and you already have recessed lights you can use their wires to pull your new wire.
I'm not sure which video you mean, but you use either a fish tape or a pull line.
I know that Verizon also has fiber with a stiffer jacket that they can push through conduit a pretty good distance. I know this because I helped the Verizon installer run FIOS at my daughter's apartment in a building that was over 100 years old. The conduit had a crimp in it so it took the two of us a while to get past that.
You can attach a string to a foam ball/plunger type thing and then suck it through with a vacuum from the other side. Then, fix your wire to the string and pull it back in the other direction.
I had my house wired up with 30 Cat 6 drops (3 being in-ceiling for AP's) and in the end it was simpler to go up to the loft (2 story house) and come down that way, with all of the cables then being bundled up and coming down through a built-in-wardrobe into the garage below.
It required a bit of patching here and there where a small chase had to be chisseled out to get around a cable going through a patch of plaster used for dot and dab (technique to quickly plasterboard/drywall onto brick), but with conduit it would have been a much simpler job.
With that drill bit you won't be able to get far with concrete brick walls...
I hired an electrician to drill the holes for me earlier this year and it took him over 10 minutes per hole to get through the 60cm (2ft) reinforced concrete slab for running cables between two floors.
I just spent a couple of weeks putting conduits in my brick walls. I couldn't reuse conduits in place for power (regulations, EU) and they are too small anyway. I used Cat6A, not fiber. I don't think an ISP will ever bring fiber to my home. Cat6A is 10 Gb/s so it should be OK for a NAS for a long time. I only have 1 Gb/s network cards now.
I'm moving into my new home (which was built in 1962) in the next month or two. My plan is to run cat 6 throughout, before I get the bulk of my stuff/furniture in. Hopefully I won't need to smash into too many walls but there will be a few. Definitely worth it in the long run though.
There are so many things I think about "if I had just done X in those few weeks before moving in the furniture".
This is an opportunity - you might want to brainstorm X.
anything in the kitchen (before you start depending on it for food and/or fill the fridge with perishable stuff)
mindfully adding specific storage. Could be the difference between moving in and piling all your stuff in random places.
related: garage - before it becomes the "catch all" for unresolved boxes of stuff you move with. A friend said overpaying closetworld for cabinets around the perimeter of his garage was money well spent.
I wish my house had conduit. To date I've never seen (much less lived in) a house with condiuit.
I live in a split level. The company I hired flat out refused to do a cat6 drop to my upstairs office, after spending nearly 40 minutes getting wire up a single story.
I'm guessing you're in the UK. Even in my relatively new house (80's), almost all cables are chased in, no conduit anywhere. Standard construction in the UK could be improved by just doing basic obvious things that other countries do.
Likely the US. Unless it’s a very new high-end house or you got lucky and bought the house a contractor built for themselves to a high standard, they did the cheapest thing the electrical code allows them to get away with, which certainly wasn’t conduit in the 80’s, unless that was local code somewhere. Certainly not in CA or FL.
I did an extensive amount of both fiber and CAT6A in my recent house build, totally about 21 miles together. I did a mixture of single mode and multimode only because of some AV device support for multimode, and because all of it was so cheap compared to the labor and time.
I ended up with significant fiber runs between the MDF and IDF closets, the server room, and all of the AV endpoints which is a typical layout. I did run single mode fiber to all 18 wireless AP access-point locations, but I suspect those will not get used much given I also have 2 CAT6A shielded wires to each AP that can support 10G AND provided power. I do use a direct fiber connection in my office to provide 10G to my network core from that desktop, but that could have been done over copper as well.
Perhaps the biggest gain over copper is my switch interconnects which are 40G from the upstairs closet to the server room. If needed it would be easy to upgrade those to 100G, and since there are 24 strands available you really could expand as far as you are every going to need to go with WDM and the like.
The one really good use case for only fiber was running it down my driveway to our gate, which is about a 1/4 mile in distance. That is something that would be more challenging to do with copper. [although I do have copper installed].
From my perspective the cost of running fiber was almost 0 compared to the entire project because so much more cost is involved in path finding and clearing ( cutting holes, etc), and the actual pulling. I was very fortunate to have a large group of friends who spent a couple of days working with me to do the large pulls, combined with many weeks of evenings and weekends doing the rest myself. Many hands makes that task much much easier.
Not surprised to see you on here. I was the guy who got into the discussion about the merits of single mode vs multi mode with a few of your friends on Facebook a while ago. I was in the multi mode camp mainly due to cost reasons whereas they were in the single mode camp for future proofing reasons.
That said, the cost gap between MM and SM optics today is much smaller especially for 10G (and for the fiber itself it seems to have even reversed), so single mode definitely makes more sense. For some reason, MM fiber is still widely deployed in certain niche use-cases though. Not quite sure why.
For example, I know that it's used on modern military jets for their 10GBASE-SR networks. I wonder if it has something to do with being able to repair terminations in the field? I know MM is pretty forgiving that way. Or maybe it's just another case of them adopting whatever was popular at that exact moment.
It was surprising the amount of AV related gear that was multimode specific! The cost differential has dropped so much now you can run either at low cost so if you have the space you can run both.
MM is easier to do mechanical splices on, and does seem to be overall less sensitive to damage. If your need is 10G and less than 300m it works well.
As an aside I ran a USB over fiber repeater that was multimode specific by accident I used a single mode fiber (same LC connector), and it worked perfectly.
It was a new house. The 18 AP locations serve a couple of different long run purposes and reasons:
The first is to have direct nearly-line of sight locations for the majority of the house which is primarily to support higher frequency(60GHz) and beyond which have poor wall penetration.
The second is to provide good wifi coverage due to signal attenuation from the construction techniques. I did many of the walls in double 5/8s drywall, some in green wall, all insulated, and all solid hard doors. Steel cross structures as well. As a result wifi propagation is surprisingly bad across rooms.
The third is to provide lots of locations to aid in flexibility of having the best locations. I do not use all 18 locations right now, but I may use more in the future.
It is also a somewhat large (>10,000 sq ft, ~ 1000 sq meters) house, so that facilitates a need for a bit more coverage.
For those wondering, as the OP didn't mention it super-clearly imho - but his internet provider is able to do 25gbit [1] for CHF 69 a month (+ CHF ~340 set up cost)
CHF 1 ~= USD 1 these days
Question for OP:
Why did you build such an expensive "router" - you justify it by saying you also want to run PiHole, but you probably could have done this whole setup much cheaply
The router is more of a server. Pihole is just an example (and yes a $35 pi would be plenty for it) but I have many old servers running all kinds of other things so I decided to update and consolidate some of this.
Has the 5800x and opnsense been able to successfully route 25Gbit/s? It's very rare to find anyone running even a 10Gbit link on opnsense/pfsense so it's difficult to know how it performs on high speed links with modern hardware. Would love any details you could share on this! (Might be worth updating your blog post with them)
I also installed fiber a while ago after being told "this isn't hard" by Michael Stapelberg's post [1]. Luckily I managed to get by with patch cables; a 30m cables really goes a long way! I even managed to get a duplex LC through a 16mm conduit with a pretty tight 90° bend, but just with lube, quite some force and luck.
I can just recommend going for it if you're curious. Cables and tranceivers really aren't expensive from fs.com (though their sales people may start bothering you).
Edit: And old, used network cards from ebay, of course.
Kudos for pulling those through these small conduits :)
For anyone trying to emulate this: I would very much NOT recommend using 16mm conduits for LC duplex patch cables. It's doable for some short/straight runs, but the connectors like to get stuck in bends. For me it was the final r=3cm bend in a ~20m conduit. I ended up pulling Cat7 into that conduit and routed the fiber through a tree-like network of wider backup conduits.
Since the backup conduit ends up in the wrong corner of the room, I might one day 1. cut the 30m fiber patch cable, 2. pull it into the original 16mm conduit (w/o connectors), replacing the Cat7 and 3. splice the fiber again. Using a "mechanical splice" that should be doable quite cheaply, but I didn't yet get around to learning/practicing that.
> My ISP plans on proving 100gbits in about 2 years so I don’t need pull new fiber if I decide to upgrade.
Jesus. Meanwhile, here in Germany, right in the center of Munich the best I can get is 100/40, because while there is FTTB buildout, the last 20m in the building go through the telephone wiring from the late 80s.
If you really want it, and are willing to pay, you can often negotiate with the building owner to get the last 20m run (up to and including conduit hidden on the outside of the building, etc).
If enough people in the building care, it might even be relatively cheap.
The latter is the problem. Half the people in the building are old, the other half of them are happy with the way it is - I'm the only IT guy. Might be possible to pull fiber through the conduits, but not sure if the Mnet FTTB box can actually give me fiber - I think it's a miniature DSLAM only.
3M sells fusion-less APC and UPC connectors that you can insert into any (well cut) fiber. I used them to fiber my home too without using a fusion machine.
I was really dubious at first but they work really well
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1. Just use UPC connectors everywhere unless you have really good reasons not to.
2. Use single mode fiber (SMF) everywhere, including internal wiring. SMF is infinitely scalable for future needs, multimode (MMF) is not. These days the cost differences for cabling and optics is negligible. In fact, SMF cabling is often cheaper than MMF. And no, you generally won’t have to worry about attenuating signal.
Also, in my extensive experience, FS.com optics modules are typically better manufactured and more reliable than OEM modules.
I resisted the "cheap chinese" modules for a long, long time, but then discovered that most of my uplink carriers used them.
It's been years now. I've had many Cisco OEM, Dell OEM, and a couple from another 3rd party manufacturer go bad, but I have yet for one FS.com SFP to go bad. I've got several hundred deployed in a wide variety of environments, from great (cool, clean areas) to bad (hot, dirty areas).
I would strongly agree that if you are running fiber, run single mode everywhere. It is amazing how far singlemode fiber can go compared to copper if you are willing to spend money on the endpoints.
My setup is much simpler - I get 25Gbit/s from init7 to Mikrotik CCR2004 https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs and then distribute it to 2x1Gbit access points, and use the other SFP28 port to power my PC (in another room) via the Intel E810 card.
I use the Feller fiber extension cable (20m) and bought some cable puller to pull the fiber via the plastic piping, and then finished it with the Feller outlet. Looks rather clean :) Photo: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FWhHwD0WAAIb3Dt?format=jpg&name=...
PS: ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs is barely coping with 25Gb/s routing. It can do it, but for multiple TCP sessions, a single one chokes the router at something like 20Gbps (down), 15 Gbps (up).
To the point that we even printed out a picture of their warehouse from google maps and wrote “thank you” on it before stapling it to the wall.
They were the best support we received.
1) I question his choice of OpnSense vs. OpenWRT. I've found OpenWRT to be less demanding on the hypervisor/host, and quite scalable.
2) Not about the article, but about your comment on Chinese modules. I've tried Chinese 10Gb SFP+ modules and I've returned all that I tried. They would overheat, and they would not operate up to the specified data rates. The name brands cost twice as much, but they work.
We’ve been using the FS modules too for years, they are very reliable. It does totally make a mockery of the vendors who claim they need to lock out other brand’s modules (from their 100% standardised port) for reliability etc.!
Generally not worth it unless you have existent infrastructure and want some more density
https://www.tlnetworx.com/blogs/news/single-mode-vs-multimod...
And to be clear, there will be hacks that scale MMF a bit, but it’s not really “infinitely” scalable due to relatively poor attenuation and light mode. Keep in mind, there isn’t one MMF spec, there’s many: eg. OM1 through OM4
MSP ISP here, we just rock the FS optics combined with an FSbox to code them as required. ;)
Just a warning for the weary: don't put a non-Fiberstore optic in their FS coding box -- you'll lock your account for a week. Ask our field team how they know this.
i.e. I assume you don't want to just wing it for every link, so do people typically choose to use all A/B on the switch side, and all B/A on the desktop/server side? If I were walking into a business, not having setup their network, what direction would I expect to need on the desktop/server side?
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Doing basic drywall and paint isn’t rocket science, but getting a professional level fit and finish actually takes a lot of practice and experience. It’s also a completely different experience when you’re trying to match old specialty paints from a previous homeowner, blending repairs to match the wall texture, and other complexities that don’t show up in those basic YT videos. If you’re in a situation with untextured walls, known paint colors, simple repairs, and a forgiving eye, then it’s really not bad, but the complexities can add up quickly.
Even in the best cases, cutting into drywall all across the house to pull wire would be a project I’d try to avoid at all costs in an occupied home. The fast path still requires multiple days to go through all of the drying and re-application cycles to build up all the right layers, not to mention dust control to keep that fine dust out of everything you own.
When the walls are off in the house is the best time to get anything done. Sometimes I don't even want to put the walls back on- for example, an unfinished garage with exposed studs is very convenient.
I'm not sure whether older houses are more maintainable by default, or just once you have rocked over some threshold of continuous occupancy, there there are sufficient layers of repair and rework that you just stop worrying about (for example) sawing through a floorboard. While I didn't have to mess with the walls, if I had, I'd just have torn down the existing plaster and redone it, like you say it's not that big of a deal
I've started plastering a few of my walls and after wasting a couple days doing a few square meters ended up hiring a couple guys to do the rest of the house. There is just no comparison in value.
Plaster walls on wood studs is a lot harder, and plaster over brick or concrete is impossible.
I don't own a house and have never owned a house. This will probably sound stupid and I am sorry if this is something obvious.
Is it that my spouse will leave me or my parents will disown me if I run a conduit just hanging on a wall? What is this obsession with hiding all wiring within the drywall? What am I missing here?
It could be something as simple as a conduit like https://i.imgur.com/6X5of8Y.png
Not that I have a leg to stand on because I still can't afford to buy a home outright (and at current rate, never will). I live in an apartment and I don't make any changes to it. I cannot even imagine doing something simple like drill a hole on the door for a doorbell. So, I am definitely hypocritical when I say this. Maybe I am just being salty as a non-home owner. I feel like all of this comes from treating our homes as some kind of liquid asset that we must keep in pristine condition at all times so we can stage it and sell it at a moment's notice.
If you own your own home, why not live in your home like you own your home? Run that conduit across all the walls (and through inside door frames or something like that if you must). If not, do you really own your own home? Why not just live with housing insecurity like I do?
Edit: spelling
To me it just feels good to wake up in a visually simple environment with things out of sight. It feels like magic, in a good way, to be surrounded by performant, reliable and useful technology but to be able to see almost none of it. And I have an automatic negative reaction to visual clutter or conspicuous machinery in my house.
I don't see anything wrong with your way of thinking. I can't easily change how I feel about it and I see no reason why either of us should have to.
Edit: this makes me think about sci-fi spaceships. Battlestar Galactica vs. the Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker's Guide. One has its conduits and controls run every which way and the other is minimalist to a fault. I like them both but would definitely prefer to wake up every morning in the latter!
Wiremold 500 surface raceway is what I would recommend, it’s a basic surface raceway for electrical conductors or cables: https://www.legrand.us/wire-and-cable-management/raceway-and...
There are probably residential raceways that blend in better, but I’m not familiar with residential construction.
There are plenty of ways to get a cable from point A to point B inside of a wall, particularly if you have a single story home with an unfinished attic and basement. A spade drill bit, a fish tape, and a multitool/rotozip can get a cable pretty much anywhere if you can drill a hole into the wall cavity from above or below.
If I walked into a listing and saw surface raceway everywhere, I’d only bid what I was comfortable paying leaving room for a gut rehab. It’s evidence of a high level of DGAF at a minimum and likely isn’t the only place that corners were cut.
My aesthetic requirements are basically zero (to the dismay of my partner indeed; we meet in the middle) but I do want to be able to practically use the apartment still.
This seems like you are missing the point. The REASON that having a conduit hanging on the wall lowers the home value is because it looks bad and ruins the aesthetics… for both the current home owner and a future home owner. The reason the person buying the house would pay less is the same reason me, the current home owner, doesn’t want it… it looks bad.
I understand that some people don’t care about aesthetics at all (I am probably closer to that end of the spectrum than most), but you also have to realize that people care about how their home looks for more reasons than just resale value. Do you think the whole world only makes their houses look nice in case they want to sell?
Well, you aren’t wrong. This is exactly the thinking behind that.
The other response is correct that it’s nicer to have it all covered up though. I guess it comes down to a bit of perfectionism. If I stick everything on the walls I will always feel like there is work left to do.
That said, our living room is still (3 years in) a mess of (nice, not industrial) on-wall conduits.
Or they just run cable along the walls.
Many garages will be as you describe.
For this house, the easiest way to pull wires from one end of the house to another (after the original construction) is to first go down into the crawl space, cross horizontally there, then go up again.
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There are so many parts of it that were "over engineered" for a house 50 years ago that are "oh, that's convenient" now.
If I built a home I'd add conduit, but that's an extremely niche idea.
[1] similar to https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/flex-bit-accessories/flex...
The US can add it but it’s an extra cost and so rarely done.
If you don't have an initial wire installed you can use a magnet kit with a specific wire to pull it through the conduit.(e.g youtube "magnepull"). A camera small comes in handy as well.
If you need to pull wires through the ceiling and you already have recessed lights you can use their wires to pull your new wire.
I know that Verizon also has fiber with a stiffer jacket that they can push through conduit a pretty good distance. I know this because I helped the Verizon installer run FIOS at my daughter's apartment in a building that was over 100 years old. The conduit had a crimp in it so it took the two of us a while to get past that.
I had my house wired up with 30 Cat 6 drops (3 being in-ceiling for AP's) and in the end it was simpler to go up to the loft (2 story house) and come down that way, with all of the cables then being bundled up and coming down through a built-in-wardrobe into the garage below.
It required a bit of patching here and there where a small chase had to be chisseled out to get around a cable going through a patch of plaster used for dot and dab (technique to quickly plasterboard/drywall onto brick), but with conduit it would have been a much simpler job.
I hired an electrician to drill the holes for me earlier this year and it took him over 10 minutes per hole to get through the 60cm (2ft) reinforced concrete slab for running cables between two floors.
This is an opportunity - you might want to brainstorm X.
anything in the kitchen (before you start depending on it for food and/or fill the fridge with perishable stuff)
mindfully adding specific storage. Could be the difference between moving in and piling all your stuff in random places.
related: garage - before it becomes the "catch all" for unresolved boxes of stuff you move with. A friend said overpaying closetworld for cabinets around the perimeter of his garage was money well spent.
adding electrical outlets, switches, etc
and yeah, cat5 or fiber
I live in a split level. The company I hired flat out refused to do a cat6 drop to my upstairs office, after spending nearly 40 minutes getting wire up a single story.
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I did an extensive amount of both fiber and CAT6A in my recent house build, totally about 21 miles together. I did a mixture of single mode and multimode only because of some AV device support for multimode, and because all of it was so cheap compared to the labor and time.
I ended up with significant fiber runs between the MDF and IDF closets, the server room, and all of the AV endpoints which is a typical layout. I did run single mode fiber to all 18 wireless AP access-point locations, but I suspect those will not get used much given I also have 2 CAT6A shielded wires to each AP that can support 10G AND provided power. I do use a direct fiber connection in my office to provide 10G to my network core from that desktop, but that could have been done over copper as well.
Perhaps the biggest gain over copper is my switch interconnects which are 40G from the upstairs closet to the server room. If needed it would be easy to upgrade those to 100G, and since there are 24 strands available you really could expand as far as you are every going to need to go with WDM and the like.
The one really good use case for only fiber was running it down my driveway to our gate, which is about a 1/4 mile in distance. That is something that would be more challenging to do with copper. [although I do have copper installed].
From my perspective the cost of running fiber was almost 0 compared to the entire project because so much more cost is involved in path finding and clearing ( cutting holes, etc), and the actual pulling. I was very fortunate to have a large group of friends who spent a couple of days working with me to do the large pulls, combined with many weeks of evenings and weekends doing the rest myself. Many hands makes that task much much easier.
My particular build is documented in a build thread: https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/jeffs-mountain-s...
That said, the cost gap between MM and SM optics today is much smaller especially for 10G (and for the fiber itself it seems to have even reversed), so single mode definitely makes more sense. For some reason, MM fiber is still widely deployed in certain niche use-cases though. Not quite sure why.
For example, I know that it's used on modern military jets for their 10GBASE-SR networks. I wonder if it has something to do with being able to repair terminations in the field? I know MM is pretty forgiving that way. Or maybe it's just another case of them adopting whatever was popular at that exact moment.
MM is easier to do mechanical splices on, and does seem to be overall less sensitive to damage. If your need is 10G and less than 300m it works well.
As an aside I ran a USB over fiber repeater that was multimode specific by accident I used a single mode fiber (same LC connector), and it worked perfectly.
The first is to have direct nearly-line of sight locations for the majority of the house which is primarily to support higher frequency(60GHz) and beyond which have poor wall penetration.
The second is to provide good wifi coverage due to signal attenuation from the construction techniques. I did many of the walls in double 5/8s drywall, some in green wall, all insulated, and all solid hard doors. Steel cross structures as well. As a result wifi propagation is surprisingly bad across rooms.
The third is to provide lots of locations to aid in flexibility of having the best locations. I do not use all 18 locations right now, but I may use more in the future.
It is also a somewhat large (>10,000 sq ft, ~ 1000 sq meters) house, so that facilitates a need for a bit more coverage.
CHF 1 ~= USD 1 these days
Question for OP:
Why did you build such an expensive "router" - you justify it by saying you also want to run PiHole, but you probably could have done this whole setup much cheaply
[1] https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/
I can just recommend going for it if you're curious. Cables and tranceivers really aren't expensive from fs.com (though their sales people may start bothering you).
Edit: And old, used network cards from ebay, of course.
[1]: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-ho...
For anyone trying to emulate this: I would very much NOT recommend using 16mm conduits for LC duplex patch cables. It's doable for some short/straight runs, but the connectors like to get stuck in bends. For me it was the final r=3cm bend in a ~20m conduit. I ended up pulling Cat7 into that conduit and routed the fiber through a tree-like network of wider backup conduits.
Since the backup conduit ends up in the wrong corner of the room, I might one day 1. cut the 30m fiber patch cable, 2. pull it into the original 16mm conduit (w/o connectors), replacing the Cat7 and 3. splice the fiber again. Using a "mechanical splice" that should be doable quite cheaply, but I didn't yet get around to learning/practicing that.
e.g.: https://www.fs.com/de-en/products/35165.html (there's instructions if you scroll down)
Jesus. Meanwhile, here in Germany, right in the center of Munich the best I can get is 100/40, because while there is FTTB buildout, the last 20m in the building go through the telephone wiring from the late 80s.
If enough people in the building care, it might even be relatively cheap.
I was really dubious at first but they work really well
PoE is still a must for powering wireless access point and perimeter security cameras.