New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

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FlyingPenguin
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New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Well the house is mostly done. The contractors are mostly out of our hair except the electrician has to come back and do a few minor things. We've had some new furniture delivered and the wife and I are spending some time there - mostly watching the pool company dig the pool - but we haven't moved in yet. That will be a slow gradual affair.

I've had fun the last couple of days setting up the networking. I had them install the network, phone and CATV wiring as if it was a commercial installation, using the pantry as the utility room. Since we have 10 foot ceilings, I have a board mounted up near the ceiling above all the pantry shelving, out of the way. There's 41 RJ45 jacks in the house, all wired CAT6 for future-proofing. Any jack can be patched as either Ethernet or phone, which is how most commercial installs are done nowadays. I'll never actually use ALL these jacks - but it's easy, and not much more expensive to run 41 cables versus 12 cables so yeah - each bedroom has 3 jacks minimum. My office has much more. There's even one out in the garage.

Here's the pantry utility panel with the switches and router connected. No modem yet because Comcast has been dragging their heels. I have a wireless virtual Ethernet connection to the old house (see below) so the two houses are networked together and, for now, I'm mooching Internet from the old house. All the COAX on the right is for cable TV (again, multiple outlets in every room, but I'll just patch what we're using). Comcast will mount a splitter/amp on the board whenever they get around to installing my cable:

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There's two Gigabit switches (a 24 port and an 8 port) because I've setup two VLANS (Virtual LANs) using a Tomato Router. The main "secure" LAN will be on the 24 port switch. There will be a second "untrusted" LAN on it's own separate network segment (using the 8 port switch), isolated from the main LAN, that will only be for the guest Wifi, a very few IOT devices (like a Ring Doorbell), and one untrusted jack in my office for working on client's PCs, so there's no chance for anything nasty on their PC to send a worm into my private network (the red CAT6 patch cables on the panel are all on the "untrusted" network). I'll have two seperate Wifi networks - one trusted and one untrusted.

Comcast has kept me hanging for 6 weeks now. The utility pole is 500+ feet from my house, so they need to bury a cable across my property. They keep scheduling a burial crew, and they don't show up. It's a sub-contractor and my theory is they're too busy going for lucrative contracts in Puerto Rico and South Florida after Hurricane Irma. I have signed a burial waiver which allows them to just run the cable across the ground (heck, if push comes to shove, if they lay the cable I'll rent a ditch witch and trench it myself), but still no joy.

However I have setup a virtual Ethernet connection between the two houses using a pair of Ubiquiti NanoBeam 5AC 16 units: https://www.ubnt.com/airmax/nanobeam-ac/



The NanoBeam consists of two small dishes which comprise a Point-to-Point wireless connection. One dish is at my old house and is configured as the Access Point (although it's completely arbitrary which end is the Access Point):

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The other dish is at the new house and is configured as a Station (there are use cases where you can have multiple stations - this is how people in rural areas setup their own wireless networks):

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The dishes just need to be line of site, and at this range aiming doesn't have to be very precise. I didn't bother using the signal strength meter in the control panel, I just eyeballed it. This system is rated for 450mbits at 6 miles, and since my houses are barely 700 feet apart, it's pretty much overkill. Signal to noise ratios aren't a problem at this range. It's rural enough out here that it's not picking up any interference. Because of bandwidth overhead for encryption, I'm actually getting slightly less than 350Mbit, but that's fine. That bandwidth is shared between upload and download. Configuration was EXTREMELY simple. The biggest bitch was crawling around the attic to run the cable. I'm getting too old for that crap. It's a regular Ethernet cable that goes to the dishes. On the other end is a POE (Power over Ethernet) box that connects to the network. I ordered a couple of outdoor rated CAT5E cables (very thick insulation) to connect the POEs to the dishes. The old house was easy since there's a large crawl space underneath. The new house was a bit of work. The garage has a huge attic above it that I ran the cable through, but getting the cable out the the eave with low clearance was a pain in the arse. I'm not as limber as I used to be. It was a lot more fun crawling on ceiling joists when I was in my 20s than it is now. Probably should have hired some skinny kid, but I'm stubborn and determined :)

Configuring the units is very easy. You log into them like any access point or router. Assign each one an IP. One gets set as the access point, and one gets set as the station. You define an SSID and password for the access point, and that's it. It takes care of everything else itself. Only other thing I had to do was to turn down the power on both units because they were hitting each other too hard. Ideally you want to have a signal strength of -50db and they were getting hit with around -40 db. Too much signal overloads the receiver and introduces noise, which equals dropped packets. I had to dial down both units to 60% power:

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Here's a bandwidth test between the two units showing I'm getting right around 311Mbps. I could actually improve that by increasing the radio bandwidth, but the trade-off is you lose the ability to have multiple connections: one PC can hog the whole network. I'm using the default bandwidth setting which is the recommendation:

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My only issue is that one of the NanoBeams is defective. It TRIED to connect to the LAN at 1GBit and fails and then falls back to 100Mbit. So although the two units can communicate between themselves at 311Mbit, I'm not getting the full benefit because the 100Mbit LAN connection is choking it. It's a known hardware issue on their forums - it's a defective chip. I have an RMA replacement coming. However, even at 100Mbit I have no problem watching videos from my server or NAS at the old house on a Media Center PC hooked up to a TV at the new house.
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Losbot
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by Losbot »

Nice work!
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by wvjohn »

You are Da Wizard of Wires!
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by Executioner »

Is this a new house or existing?
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Oh, the pantry/utility closet photo is the new house, designed for CAT6 and a proper centralized patch panel from the ground up.

Old house is just a hodge-podge nightmare of network wiring. Some Cat5, some CAT5E, most run under the crawl space (and occasionally chewed on by squirrels) with no proper patch panel or centrally located router or switch. Modem and router is in the living room behind the TV, there's an 8 port switch in my office, and another one in the patio. It's a mess that's just been added on to as needed over the years.

I was really excited about designing the network at the new house from scratch with an orderly and clean commercial layout, with everything centralized and without switches scattered everywhere.

Only thing that will be scattered around will be several wireless access points for full coverage. Probably five: 3 on the secure network, and 2 on the "unsecure" IOT/Guest network. Those will mostly be wall outlet APs, although a couple of regular ones with REAL antennas will be in the utility closet, and maybe the closet in my office.

I'm researching a few different wall outlet AP units like this one (literally becomes a wall outlet):
https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Network ... B06XZLP8Q6

Or this one, which I've used before for clients:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R92CLCW/re ... B00R92CL5E

Leaning towards the first one because Ubiquiti makes some solid commercial grade products and secures their firmware. Also looks a LOT nicer. I'm pretty much over the sloppy security in home quality routers.

Didn't want to get into commercial ceiling mounted units.
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Hmm. Cisco has a wall plate AP also. Have to research them. I know the Ubiquiti unit has no built in CP. Ypu need to run their controller software on a PC to configure them. It's designed for Enterprise customers.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/ ... index.html.
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by FlyingPenguin »

My office:

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Office closet where the file server, NAS and a small form factor PC I use for running Spinrite on hard drives will be setup:
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I'm going to try VERY HARD to keep everything OFF THE FLOOR. Not even cables. So the desk has "J" channel cable trays on the side along the wall and facing the window. Surge protector strips are attached to the front side of the desk, and there's one on top of the desk along the wall side (under the hutch) for working on client PCs. The mat is to protect the desk from getting scratched when repairing PCs.

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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by Pugsley »

You have that closet vented? My friend used to keep all his AV stuff in a closet and kept overheating stuff. The back wall was connected with the down stairs stairwell so he put a 120mm fan at the top of the closet and a vent in the bottom and sent the heat to that stairwell. Solved all the issues he was having.
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Yes. Both the pantry/utility closet, and my office closet have an AC vent. Also adequate breathing room under the doors for return air. Yeah I made darn sure of that when the ductwork was installed.
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by Pugsley »

Nice.
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Replacement for the defective NanoBeam dish came in, and it seems to maintain a 1Gbit connection to the switch when I tested it. I'll configure it and swap it out tomorrow and see if I get full bandwidth.
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by Pugsley »

Questions about your vents. Do yo have heat and AC going to the closets or just return vents and let the room air into the closets? IF you have AC vents they will be heat vents in the winter?

IF it were me I would put all the return vents at the tops of the closets and leave a gap at the bottom of the doors to pull in the makeup air. The only down side of all that is the dust that will collect in everything since all the air in the house has to go through the closets to go back to the furnace. But boy would the airflow will be good.
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by FlyingPenguin »

AC vents. Yeah, in the winter heat comes through the same vents, but we never run heat, except maybe one or two days of the year, just first thing in the morning just to take the chill out before taking a shower. It's central Florida, and the wife and I like the cold. No problems sleeping with the house as cold as 63 degrees. Just throw on another blanket and sleep like a baby.

New house is even better insulated than the old house, so I'd be surprised if we ever run the heat. Went down to 45 the other night and when I went to the new house in the morning it was 71 in there.
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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by FlyingPenguin »

New NanoBeam dish installed and it's connecting to the LAN at a full 1 Gbit.

File tranfer speed just copying a large video file from the server at the old house to a PC at the new house:

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Re: New house networking & wireless NanoBeam virtual ethernet

Post by Genom »

NM, I just noticed the wireless link itself is 300Mb. Carry on!
21.1MB/s is pretty low for 1Gb. Something seems fishy there.
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