Posts tagged network

Home Wiring

Don't Panik 2 Comments
24 Cat 5e cables and more…

Wanted to post this much earlier but didn’t have the time to. When it was time to replace all the old wiring in my new home, it made sense to lay enough cable drops to various rooms and areas in the house. I used Cat 5e cabling because I had a box of it lying around. Cat 6 would be better but no point throwing a thousand feet of good cable away. A few hiccups happened for the wiring contractor conveniently forgot to add a drop near the kitchen and dining so those areas will need to be wireless now and means they can’t get Satellite TV either via Cat 5. All cables were home-run (star topology) into my “home office” room. I didn’t want a standard Rack occupying the space so I turned Ikea-hacker. An Ikea PS cabinet was modified with my dremel tool to mount a 24-port patch panel and patch block to distribute phone lines. Since I had a DSL link, I patched all phones behind the DSL splitter which makes things cleaner.

Ikea PS. Just what is needed!

Data-links were patched to a Linksys (Cisco Small Business) SRW2008 managed gigabit switch which in turn is fed off my dual-WAN Linksys RV042 VPN router. Also connected is a DLink DIR-655 wireless router and a Netgear 10/100 8-port POE switch to power my IP cameras distributed around the house. It all fit somewhat nicely into the Ikea PS cabinet with space for two Belkin power strips fed off an APC UPS with extended run battery. That’ll give an approximate three hour runtime for my cameras, broadband and network during a power outage.

Improvements? I’ll need to add a few more cable drops for IP cameras sometime this year and since my NAS will be coming soon, I’ll probably need another patch panel. I’ve three data ports in each room, that makes 9 plus my “home office” has 4 ports so I’ve already used 13. My living room and common area has another four ports so that goes to 17. I’ve 3 POE ports outside the home (to be increased to 5) so that’s 20. My phone line distribution ends up take another three so I’m effectively out of ports! The picture below is not the latest one as I’ve added a modified shelf to hold my router to make space for a 16-port 10/100/1000 switch below and will be color coding the patch cables for easier maintenance soon.

Cabled up and running!

BTW for those interested in laying their own Cat 5 or 6 cables to connect to Telekom Malaysia’s demarcation point such as a telephone pole, here’s a quick guide depending if your cables are new or not. Newer cables are usually color coded. Mine are blue/white and white/blue and typically, you’ll use the same matching blue/white & white/blue center pair in the Cat 5 cable. The good thing about Cat 5 is that you can carry more phone lines on the same cable using another pair (up to 4) so your one single Cat 5 cable can then be split internally (hence my patch block & patch panel) to multiple incoming phone lines and devices (fax, line 1, line 2, etc). Typically, white/blue (white cable with blue stripes) is the positive cable but do verify with a voltmeter to be sure. In older areas sometimes the color is red and green where green is positive. If you have all black cable, a ridge (feel for it) marks the side of the twin cable that’s the positive wire.

p.s. Sorry for the photo quality — all taken with my iPhone 🙂

Windows Se7en :) & Metro-E

Don't Panik 2 Comments

While Malaysian broadband is lacking in more ways than one can count, there is yet hope. A certain monopolistic company and their terrible service is all most of us have but if you can actually afford it, SDSL is much better considering the guaranteed transfer speeds compared to best-effort. Best effort in boleh-land is probably equivalent of try-lah. You’ll probably encounter download speeds as fast as 100kb/second to about 1kb/second. Yes, it’s that variable. Come to think of it, Malaysian traffic is similar. I can take anywhere from 15 to 100 minutes to get to work!

There’s yet another option – Metro Ethernet. Yes, many cities in Korean and Japan have high speed Ethernet broadband connections while our fancy broadband is still stuck at the mostly same speeds it launched with seven years ago! Paneagle has it’s Metro-E in select buildings and areas and if you can afford it, a certain monopoly’s broadband becomes dial-up! This is a 5Mbps Metro-E link.

Check-out my simultaneous download of Windows 7 from the MSDN site 🙂 and yes, I’m still in Malaysia! Here’s the info on my IP address:
IP address: 202.169.29.70
Reverse DNS: [No reverse DNS entry per ns01.paneagle.com.my.]
ASN Name: PANEAGLE-MY-AP (Paneagle Communications Sdn Bhd, Metro-Ethernet & Internet Access Provider, Malaysia)
IP range connectivity: 1
Registrar (per ASN): APNIC

Wireless Security

Don't Panik

From experience (and analyzing the airwaves), quite a number of people ignore security when they get their wireless networks setup. Well, all that security is inconvenient I suppose but do you know how far your wireless access point or router transmits to? This is more apparent in a condominium or apartment setup where you not only have neighbors beside you, you also have to worry about neighbors above and below you. At one point, before I moved to a house, I could pick up networks three floors up. While the signal strength is not good, breaking into it was simple was it used WEP and a five character password.
More than half my surrounding networks at that point had no security! and worse still, many still had their default linksys, dlink or belkin setup IP addresses, usernames and passwords! I taught someone a lesson by changing his wireless router password and within a few days, the router got setup with WPA.
WPA itself is not invulnerable and I’ve successfully got into a few WPA networks around my condo unit with BackTrack because their WPA passwords were nothing more than simple strings like “linksys” or “mynetwork”.
Anyways, after I got my soon-to-be-replaced Belkin wireless router up, I went around my house with inSSIDer and kismet. What you see below is inSSIDer’s scan of my neighborhood. First thing I normally do is to lower the transmit power to ensure my router doesn’t broadcast further than my main gate. My Belkin router doesn’t do that but it’s going to be replaced in a few days so no worries. Secondly, to ensure good connectivity, you make sure there’s no channel overlaps. You can see my hopefaithandlove network all by itself on channel 1. You also can see most other networks have none (gasp!) or purely WEP security. Finally, I normally make the WPA2 key long enough. My method is to pick a favorite verse from the bible. If you want tighter security, don’t leave spaces, substitute occasional numbers for alphabets, and perhaps throw in a Greek or Yiddish word in the process! Better still if you have more resources, go with WPA-Enterprise with a Radius authentication server… client certificates, the works! Ah, a totally different ballgame. For me, I stick to WPA2, put my wireless on a separate VLAN so that if someone gets into my wireless network, all they can do is get to the internet. Not good but better than having the ability to hit my main PC or File server.

On the Grid

Don't Panik

The Casa Damansara infrastructure is up and running! Of course, right now, the only thing that is missing is the wireless HSDPA bridge/modem but everything, including local 802g and local LAN is up and running! Full firewall and packet inspector is also live! All we need to do is move my storage servers and other PCs!

I need a new clock

Don't Panik

Of course this clock happens to be a Wireless-N (108MBps) router and access point is a bonus! 🙂

How time flies

Life

My goodness. Time is really flying and soon it’ll be October 6th! Anyways, been busy setting up the infrastructure for the new home. Well, overall, the connection is quite simple. A two-layer router and SPI/IPS firewall ought to keep things safe and sound. Front-line is a Belkin Wireless-G router with basic NAT firewall and routing. The cool thing about this router is the guest access option which allows me to create two WPA keys, one for my network, another for guests. The guest key only allows internet access so overall, pretty cool. Finally, the second layer router is a Cisco Systems 4-port VPN router with packet inspector (SPI) and Intrusion Prevention system (IPS) providing access to my inner network (Green zone). The good thing about this little Cisco box is its ability to have dual-WAN ports – quite useful when you need reliable network connectivity (or higher-speed since it allows load-balancing on two links). Internally, I’ll be relying on a Gigabit switch providing jumbo packet support (essential for large photo and imaging work) and 1000mbps speed! Woohoo! Now let’s see how long TM takes to get me my basic phone and broadband links!