What do you do when you’re missing your wife and darling daughter? In my case, you keep busy.
I had intended to go into the crawlspace under our house at the weekend to lay down some CAT5e cable. The intention was to run Ethernet to the spot directly under where our TV is located, then up through a tiny hole in the floor that the previous owners must have (had) drilled. That would give us the much needed wired network access that we’re missing in the living-room.
Well, when I went to do the work, I noticed that I had purchased the wrong kind of cable; I had bought solid cable instead of braided. So, I went back to Media Markt yesterday and switched my solid cable for a 50m reel of braided.
Today, I had no good reason to put off the work any longer, so with the family out of the way, I got down to some undisturbed work in the cellar.
The crawlspace under our house is really quite vile. It’s not just a flat, dusty space down there. Oh no, it’s full of rubble, old plastic bags, bits of old wire and God knows what else; probably a load of rat turds and asbestos, I shouldn’t wonder.
I’d bought a nice, powerful Maglite torch yesterday, an essential piece of kit when crawling around on your belly and elbows in the pitch black. It has a rotary head, so that you can turn from a wide angle beam into a sharp, bright point of light. I’d been bitching for ages that we didn’t own a decent torch, but thanks to a local ironmonger’s, that’s now been put to rights.
Anyway, I was under the house for only about fifteen minutes and there were no unexpected hitches. It was easy to draw the cable across the breadth of the house and feed it up into the living-room.
Upon exiting the crawlspace, I immediately headed upstairs for a shower. My clothes, skin and hair were covered in… I don’t even want to know what.
Back downstairs, I carefully stripped the cable in the living-room and crimped an RJ-45 connector onto the end, using an excellent guide, turned up by Google. If you think that I know the colour-coding order of an Ethernet cable off by heart, you’d be wrong.
With one end done, I went back downstairs into the cellar and crimped a connector onto the other end. I then hooked up that end to the router.
Back in the living-room, I plugged the other end of the cable into the on-board Ethernet jack of the MythTV box, tried to bring up the link and… bingo!
Sep 20 16:43:32 tourbillon kernel: e1000: eth0: e1000_watchdog_task: NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Full Duplex
I’ve already decommissioned the 802.11b WLAN card inside the MythTV box, as it’s no longer needed. It wasn’t working well any more anyway, because it was suffering interference from the wireless speakers of our recently purchased Logitech Z-5450 5.1 speaker set.
With a 100 Mbit link from the MythTV box, I’ll now be able to stream TV programmes to my workstation on the top floor, which could be handy if Sarah is commandeering the real TV downstairs.
In the future, I suspect we’ll eventually move to gigabit Ethernet and a distributed MythTV set-up, so that we can stream programmes and DVDs to televisions anywhere in the house. We could even make the front-ends discless, so that there would be almost no noise emanating from the cases.
Anyway, that stuff is all some way off yet. I’m just happy to finally have Ethernet where the TV is.