In my continuing quest to get a network cable or two up into the study on the second floor, I decided this evening to investigate a weird wire that runs up the outside of the house, from the base of the back wall up and through the second-floor brickwork. (On the right of that picture is an obvious phone wire; it's the one on the left that has me confused.) Just on the other side of the wall that that wire goes through is a telephone jack, so I've always assumed that it was an exterior phone run that was put in by a telco installer sometime in the past. Looking into it, I got a bit of...

Good news: rather than a two-pair phone cable, the wire is a twisted-pair cable with eight wires! This gave me a little bit of hope, but given that the prior owner painted the cable from end to end, I wasn't able to read anything on the sheath to tell me whether it was network-grade cabling. Since the end at the base of the house is attached to nothing at all, I decided to slice off a six-inch bit and check it out, and that led me to the...

Bad news: it's Cat 3 cable, so it's pretty much useless for getting anything but a slow-as-molasses connection up there. And looking behind the telephone jack faceplate in the study, it doesn't look like the Cat 3 cable comes into the outlet box in a straight shot, so I don't think I can use it to pull a Cat 5 cable through the same set of holes through the brick and drywall. Knowing that a phone wire and the Cat 3 cable both go through the exterior wall, I assumed that I'd find just the two inside that outlet box, but instead I got a bit of...

Confusing news: sure enough, behind that faceplate is a phone wire connected to the jack, as well as the other end of the Cat 3 cable. But then there are the ends of three other wires in there, all phone-type cables, and I have no idea at all where they run. I've traced and accounted for every single wire in our basement and garnered no clues; I can see that a few of the three mystery wires run upward out of the outlet box, but there's truly nothing up there at all for them to run towards. It's baffling to me, and worthy of some thoughts about how to investigate further.

Now that we have most of our boxes unpacked, one of the tasks that made it onto my to-do list yesterday was getting some of our in-house network cabling done. Our internet service comes into the basement, where I have a shelving unit full of computers and networking equipment; for the past week, we just threw a wireless router down there and used our laptops up on the first floor. The signal doesn't reliably get up to all of the second floor, though, meaning that our office up there was more or less a no-computer zone, not something that's optimal for long-term life. Thus, I really wanted to get some cabling in that would allow us to move the wireless router up higher in the house, and maybe even provide wired network service to the desktop computers.

I decided to start simple, and planned out the wiring between the basement and the first floor. I figured that the logical place for the cabling to terminate was the living room -- on the baseboard just behind our television stand -- and this turned out to be pretty easy to achieve thanks to the stack of stairways that runs behind the wall against which the TV sits. I ran two category 5e cables across the exposed basement ceiling joists, through the single sheet of drywall that forms the inner wall of our basement stairs, up the wall about six inches, and then straight into the area behind the baseboard. I was (needlessly, it turns out) hesitant to install keystone jacks and a flush faceplate into the baseboard without also putting in an outlet box, so I used a double surface-mount jack box at both ends instead, and then punched the cable down into the jacks. After testing everything out, I had two connections in place from my basement up to the living room, both capable of supporting up to gigabit ethernet speeds.

Moving the wireless router upstairs has been great, and the second connection meant I was also able to move the Vonage phone adapter out of the basement as well. (We have a wireless phone system hooked up to the Vonage line, and now we're able to have the phone base up in the living room where it provides a bit more reliable coverage throughout the house.) My problem, though, is that this has whet my appetite to also get wiring from the basement up to our study on the second floor, and I can't see an easy way to do that without either ripping into walls or running the cabling outside. We have a mixture of plaster-and-lathe and sheetrock walls (with the sheetrock ones mostly framed in front of the original plaster ones), and we don't have any obvious clever places (like stacks of closets, or perfectly vertical plumbing pipe columns) that connect the basement to the second floor. I'm going to have to think this one through a bit, and in the mean time, set up a wireless router as a repeater on the second floor so that I can put our printer onto the network. Here's hoping for a solution!

(Postscript: I had all intention of taking a few pictures to illustrate this post, but got buried in the paperwork I need to fill out to start my new job tomorrow. Sorry!)

Over the past week, Shannon and I moved from Brookline, MA down to Washington, DC, hence the silence here at Doing it Ourselves. Yesterday, I penned a long post that went into some of the tools and tricks that I found were critical to making the move as painless as possible -- and as I was doing a final read on the post, my Powerbook hard disk crashed. Hard. (Seriously, it's making noises like a jet engine.) So I'm off to the Apple Store tomorrow morning to see what they can do for me, and I'll try to get that post up as soon as my depression lifts.

(Not-so-funny fact: I backed up all of my computers that were making the move in the day or two before the truck arrived. But, since my laptop was going to be with me rather than on the truck, I didn't back it up -- and it's the only computer that is now dead as a doornail. I have a backup from late February or early March, so I'm in OK shape, but it's a lesson learned.)

Now that we're officially homeowners in Washington, DC, Shannon and I had to decide on what we were going to do for phone service. Here in Brookline, we went with our cable company's phone offering as part of a larger bundle of services, but the only cable company that serves our part of DC doesn't offer phone service there. That meant that our choices were between the local Baby Bell, sticking with a cellphone-only life, or going the route of broadband (VoIP) phone service; being total geeks, we decided on broadband, specifically on Vonage. Even though we're not moving until the end of June, I figured that our desire to know our new phone number meant that we should go ahead and get everything set up now, and I'm here to tell you that the entire process could not have been any easier.