The Mess II

[frederic]

Yeah I pulled all the phone, network, CATV, and audio when my house was built (90% of it is still not terminated ;P)

I slung cat 5E to every room in the house (I mean EVERY room) and a lot of it is unterminated. My wife, after I ran all these cables, decided having cat 5E in the bathrooms is a bit much. Same for the bedroom. :-D

I bought really high quality stuff as well... except I caused myself a world of hurt... when I pulled it because I had limited number of boxes, I pulled a strand at a time... turns out I burned the outer casing on several wires by pulling others against them (the friction caused by a cat5 cable is horrid ) Anyhow... long story short... had to pull it ALL back out and inspect it... and put it back.

By the way, if you're pulling wires through conduit, whether it be one or many, or some now some later, always use electrician's grease as you feed the wire in. When the ends come out the other side, wipe it off with a paper towel and splice in. Protects your wires, and is just a little yucky to touch when teh wire comes out the other end.

For particularly thick power cabling not only was the cable greased, but also pulled through with a gasoline powered wire puller.

When the strands are 6 ga, and you have 60 strands making up "stranded power wire", trust me, human's ain't pulling that through conduit grease or no grease :-D But thats how you get 1000A into a commercial building.

 

[Velvet Elvis]

Yeah I pulled cat5 to every room too... EVERY phone outlet is cat5 (and yes... I've got stereo, phone, and cable in the bathrooms )

My bedroom has 6 full Cat 5 runs and 3 CATV runs, plus overhead audio with a complete control system (wall controller for home stereo).

I went a little overboard

Then as it turns out, I put wireless network in (so I'm not even using most of the Cat5)... and then bought a high end cordless business phone system, so all the room phones are cordless too

Oh well.

Velvet Elvis

 

[frederic]

I went a little overboard

Then as it turns out, I put wireless network in (so I'm not even using most of the Cat5)... and then bought a high end cordless business phone system, so all the room phones are cordless too

Nothing wrong with overboard. I wanted gigE for the connections between the servers, and the studio's PC's, because I store everything on the server rather than on the PC. This way if the PC exlodes, dies, catches on fire, eats a hard drive, all the data is intact, and I simply have to reload windows and cakewalk, premiere, and a few other things.

For everything else, I was going to use wireless, however after buying all the "stuff" it simply didn't work. At all. I have a slate roof, as well as plaster walls (with the wire mesh underneath), so I'm guessing the house materials were just too dense to pass a reliable signal. So, I tried an external antenna, and mounted it in the attic, which worked great if my wireless laptop was in the attic. Walk downstairs, well, that was that. So I returned everything and went gigE for the studio, and 10/100 everywhere else. Technically, the whole house is gigE, just that I only have four gigE ports on my HP switch in the basement. So my studio has gigE, and the three servers. My wife gets 100mb

 

[fierojoe]

I went a little overboard

Those who went overboard yesterday are those who are glad today. Those who didn't, are upgrading.

 

[Velvet Elvis]

Ahh so very true.

I was looking around the house at all the 'stereo control modules' I still need to purchase and install (the wires are there, but there are blank covers over the wall boxes for now)... at $300 a pop, its going to be a while

Velvet Elvis

 

[frederic]

Ahh so very true.

I was looking around the house at all the 'stereo control modules' I still need to purchase and install (the wires are there, but there are blank covers over the wall boxes for now)... at $300 a pop, its going to be a while

Velvet Elvis

heh-heh.

I even went as far as buying leviton faceplates with Banana jacks installed, so I can have a large jackplate in the front corner of the room where the amps will be, and feeds around the room (10 ga stranded speaker wire) to all four corners, center and sub, and two on the sides for the very remote possibility I might do 7.1 surround work again. I decided at the minimal cost of speaker wire it would be smart to put it all inside the walls rather than snake it in later on the odd chance that I end up doing that.

I also ran more gigE into the room than I need. I ran those two ports, then decided, oh, what the hell, and now behind that jack are eight more wires going to the basement HP procurve. I'm going to leave them unterminated, but the wires will be there. This eliminates the need for a network switch in the room. The $50 in wire and wallplates saves me $219 for a gigabit switch in the room :-D

I didn't bother with wiring the entire house with audio, simply because my wife and I have different tastes, so having one system throughout is not feasible. I listen to the radio via live365.com as does my wife, so we can listen to what we want.

Works for me. Bandwidth is a good thing :-D

 

[Velvet Elvis]

Yeah we listen to different stuff at home too... but I usually let my wife and the kids have reign of the radio... Plus our house isn't that big, so the distributed audio is mainly so that we can walk from room to room and have decent sound.

Of course I have speakers in the master suite and above the whirlpool too

Actually one thing I plan on doing is having the studio feed come in to the distro for the audio as well... so that if the kids or my wife want to hear what I am working on the can.

What software do you use for you web cam streaming?

Velvet Elvis

 

[frederic]

Of course I have speakers in the master suite and above the whirlpool too

My whirlpool is standing on its side in the garage. Its on the to-do list. Its a very long list.

Actually one thing I plan on doing is having the studio feed come in to the distro for the audio as well... so that if the kids or my wife want to hear what I am working on the can.

I debated doing that, but then I decided not to. I'm thinking instead, I'll have a recording light on the outside of the studio, and an electric doorlock that locks the door when energized, so when actually recording, houseguests (and wife) are locked out.

Haven't found a product like that yet, hence my other thread about a PIC-based smpte display.

What software do you use for you web cam streaming?

My webcams are Dlink DCS-1000's, which essentially is a color camera with an ethernet port built in. They have a built in webserver, so all I have to do is turn it on, and forward a port on my firewall to it. I have four cameras, they were fairly inexpensive, and I like that they are self contained. All one needs is a ethernet connection and its live. They also have wireless versions of the same thing, but wireless doesn't work for me.

They stream, they can update web/ftp servers, take pictures based on a schedule, and can use the NTP protocol to display atomic-clock accurate times too. They come with mounts that are mediocre, but acceptable, but you can use any standard camera mount/tripod/stand.

Once everything is up and running again, I'll have things sorted out like this:

www.midimonkey.com --> main website
www.midimonkey.com:81 --> camera 1
www.midimonkey.com:82 --> camera 2
etc...

I have the camera outlets wired together, so at a flip of a switch they go offline at one flick of a switch. Since they contain webservers, I apply power, they go to the net to get accurate time/date info based on my timezone, and they're online good to go.

Couldn't be any easier. Beats serial, usb, and other cameras that just suck in general.

The software that comes with them is nice, you can view up to 16 simultaniously in one window, as well as record to AVI files either all of them in one "security" multi-windowed thing, or individually.



Velvet Elvis [/B][/QUOTE]

 

[Velvet Elvis]

That's pretty sweet... I was toying with using MS's media server so that I could stream audio AND video at the same time.

 

[frederic]

That's pretty sweet... I was toying with using MS's media server so that I could stream audio AND video at the same time.

I have both icecast and darwin daemons installed on my main linux server, so I can in theory stream audio and video. Darwin does quicktime, and icecast is a shoutcast compatible thing, both run well on linux.

The problem for me at this time is outgoing bandwidth. I have 8mb coming in, but only 32K going out.

At least until I get "business cable modem", then I'll have 4mb in both directions. And the "house" will have personal cable for regular surfing, downloads, etc.

For $70 a month, its the most bang for the buck, and I get static IP's! Woot!

 

[Velvet Elvis]

Are the Linux daemons free? I've got a redhat box that I could setup dedicated (though Mediacomm doesn't allow me to put 'servers' on my connection )

Got any links to those programs?

 

[frederic]

Are the Linux daemons free? I've got a redhat box that I could setup dedicated (though Mediacomm doesn't allow me to put 'servers' on my connection )

Got any links to those programs?

Its linux, its free

Comcast doesn't allow me to run a server, however they thought they were being clever by blocking incoming DNS. Thats fine, I just use an external DNS service such as dyndns.org. They resolve midimonkey.dyndns.org and midimonkey.com to my server, even if the IP address changes.

Icecast: http://www.icecast.org/

Darwin: http://www.opendarwin.org/downloads/

 

[Velvet Elvis]

I guess I could do the same thing... I use an outside DNS to forward to my static web page (which they DO allow)... so I guess I could port forward beyond that.

 

[frederic]

I guess I could do the same thing... I use an outside DNS to forward to my static web page (which they DO allow)... so I guess I could port forward beyond that.

Yep.

Also set your firewall to block pings.
Use a linux webserver otherwise all the dipshits on your cable segment (or dsl network) will give you the nimba virus.

I created a script that goes through the logs every night, and any requests for blahblahblah/cmd.exe or blahblahblah/scripts (neither of which exist on linux) swipes the IP out of the logfile, and appends it to /etc/hosts.deny with ALL:<ip>.

They can never see me again. I hate anklebyters.

This is a change for me, I used to log them, then see what ports they had open (again, with another script, and log the results), then decide what I wanted to do about it.

Now I just automatically block them and be done with it.

 

[Velvet Elvis]

right now all my stuff at home is already behind a linksys box that blocks pings etc...

I don't have the linux box online yet there... its still in pieces.

 

[frederic]

right now all my stuff at home is already behind a linksys box that blocks pings etc...

Cool.

I don't have the linux box online yet there... its still in pieces.

Easy to do, just wipe your windows server. Its crap anyway :-D

 

[Velvet Elvis]

No windows server there either

Just my two desktops.

But I've got a nice Athlon XP box that I'm going to be using for the Linux streamer etc.

 

[frederic]

But I've got a nice Athlon XP box that I'm going to be using for the Linux streamer etc. [/B]

I have three servers in the basement running redhat 9.

A compaq 1850R I got used, P400 768 mb ram, dual processor, large raid array (now my mail server), and above that is a athlon 1800+ POS which is web and ftp, with an even larger raid array.

To the left is an old Compaq 4500R, a quad pentium 75, which does all the backups on the large tape array sitting on top of it.

Unfortunately the tape array is too long to fit into the racks

 

[Velvet Elvis]

That's excellent....

Now if you could just do something about all the water rott on your wall behind the servers ;P Man you'd think a guy like you would know how to use some Killz(tm) and some water block and get a nice snazzy paint job going bwahahahahahaha

Velvet Elvis

 

[frederic]

your wall behind the servers ;P Man you'd think a guy like you would know how to use some Killz(tm) and some water block and get a nice snazzy paint job going bwahahahahahaha

Thats old water rot. Its been there long before we moved in 2 years ago.

In the very front of the picture you can see my portable generator. When the power goes out, I plug the sumps into the generator, as well as the UPS on the bottom of the rack, and keep everything running.

Remodeling the basement is a loooooooooooooow priority tee hee