First proper post in a while

Writing a proper post after all this time is a bit of a toughy. It's like when you don't buy a lot of music and then decide that you want to buy a CD (some people still buy those, right?). My advice to people in that situation has always been to just buy something completely arbitrary and then it'll make the next purchase so much easier. So, for no other reason than it's a bit of a home project I've been working on here's a post on home networking.

Anyone who has followed this blog from a while back will know that we live in a bit of a weird house. It's old and it's kind of a bit of a weird shape. It's kind of long and stepped and has interior walls that used to be exterior walls. From the top/front end we've got spare room, dining room, living room, kitchen and then play/informal dining room.

Now, for those of you who don't know; I'm a geek. An obsessive, tinkering, gaming geek. This means that we need to have connectivity in order to live.

Networking this place has been a nightmare.

Firstly, we live out in the sticks. The fastest broadband connection we can get is 2-Meg. So it's kind of hard to justify going with a premium ISP. So we plumped for Sky's basic package. This is capped, has a 2-Meg maximum speed and has a proprietry (and therefore a bit locked-down) router. But it's free, so you get what you pay for.

Secondly, the house isn't designed for wireless. The broadband runs into our lounge, which is where we spend a lot of our time (it's where I'm writing this from, for example). From this point, the range of the wireless router is roughly 3ft into the dining room (those damned interior walls that used to be exterior ones) and not much further than the kitchen (I put this down to having to broadcast through tins, built-in cupboards and kitchen appliances).

Which is a bit limiting.

What I wanted to do was have the spare room as an office (and, to be honest a bit of a retreat where I could go and play XBox some time in the future), our music broadcast to the play room (especially now that we've got the decking done, so we've got a nice entertaining area on that end) and wireless access wherever we need it (we surf a lot, especially as we now both have phones with wi-fi).

The priority then was:

1. Get network access in the spare room in order to turn it into an office.
2. Get MP101 working in play room.
3. Turn any wired access points into wireless ones where necessary.
4. Get second XBox ;)

First thing I tried was a wireless range extender. While this worked in principle, it wasn't much use and didn't overcome the broadcasting-though-big-sandstone-walls issue. It allowed the range of the wireless network to extend to the whole of the dining room, but no further.

So I decided to take a punt on Powerline netorking. This was a bit of a dream to be honest. Literally, plug it into the wall and the router and then plug the other one into the office and a cheap wired router (did I mention that this all had to be done on the cheap?). Had a bit of a problem with the software CD that came with them (didn't run) and another problem with DNS failures (had to resort to static DNS settings and therefore static IP addresses). Otherwise, all good.

With the network working in the spare room, the work could start on turning it into an office. That's worked out well and has meant that working from home is now a dream, rather than the uncomfortable, warm-crotched experience it had been in the past. It's also meant that I could plug our old beast of a desktop in as a media server to stream music, etc to the XBox.

So this left me with a spare Wireless Extender, which I have now set up in the play room and which is giving us wireless access at that end of the house and (I have to imagine as it hasn't stopped raining since) on the decking.

So this leaves:

1. Setting MP101 up (with my old amp and speakers).
2. Replacing cheap wired router with cheap wireless router to give wireless access in the office.
3. Saving up for second XBox 360 (and convincing wife that it's essential).

Lessons learned in this exercise:

1. How to write a batch file that allows me to easily switch between my static IP settings at home and my static IP settings at work.
2. Not to bother trying to set a PC up as a wireless access point (by bridging a connection to a wireless card) - too much of a PITA to be worth it.
3. Phones don't like wireless extenders.
4. www.skyuser.co.uk is a great resource for hacking into your Sky router.
5. Apart from the dodgy CD, cheap powerline network adaptors seem to work just as well as expensive ones.
   

Questions that I could do with answering:

1. Can I get my Netgear MP101 to work with WPA encryption? I'd prefer not to have to change the settings on the router as it means changing the settings on all my wireless devices.
2. Is there any reliable way to share my DLC between two XBoxes, especially considering that I'll be using the same profile on each?
3. Is my network secure without having run any configuration on my powerline network adaptors? The CD didn't work, so the two adaptors are just plugged in.
4. Can I get generic powerline network configuration software anywhere that will allow me to lock it down a bit?

Thanks for your time,

Chris