You can't handle it! In 2018 or 2019, I was introduced to the idea of hyper-rationality. I think it was under another name (to be given shortly) and as part of a presentation by George Dinwiddie on, of all things, estimation. It was a funny place to be introduced to ideas from psychology and family therapy, as well as organizational psychology and collaboration, but there it is. It is nice to be smart. It's extra nice to be right. It is wonderfully nice to be right, smart, rational, and helpful to others. Sometimes we put too much emphasis on being right and forget to be helpful. Hyper-rationality is a state of being excessively or inordinately rational. It is a belief in rational truth as an unassailable fortress, that being correct is all that matters. For instance, consider the sentiment that if I am right or I am telling the truth then you have no right to be offended or upset. It might feel right, but it sounds wrong. When people are acting hyper-ra...
Total wireless. I use Clear for Home for my families internet needs. The only wire runs from the Apple TV into the WiFi router because that was a zero-config setup. My own personal/business network is a dedicated Clear Mobile Hotspot that I plug into my MBP's USB cable with Wi-Fi disabled. This way I don't impact my kid's Thomas the Train episodes or my wife's Korean drama addiction (I kid you not and there're a million episodes on Hulu.)
ReplyDeleteTim,
ReplyDeleteSo, I've been pretty pleased with my home network in the past (working exclusively out of my home office between 2007 to 2012 with only 6 months out of it during that time) and feel I can give some pretty solid advice.
First thing- get your house professionally wired for networking. Don't be half-assed about this. I actually went with a former coworker of ours (Michael Schultheiss) who had a side-business doing this. For this, you'll want to pick a central location in your house for your main hub into your house. I'd go with something both central to the house and with easy access for any ISP workers who may come out in the future to set up or diagnose ISP-related problems. Personally, I went with a closet central to the house by our front door. This closet has the ports that then fan out via wires to the rest of the home.
Next, you'll want a minimum of one good router. Traditionally, I went with Linksys (I had a WRT54G that lasted me 7+ years), however the Linksys brand is now dead and they're all just Ciscos. My current one is a Cisco WRV210 which has VPN and a bunch of great small business features. The problem is, it's unreliable as hell and is constantly crashing. Thus, I'd suggest shopping around and being careful with which you want to get.
This router will be your main interface to the outside world. Get a good one that can define your private network (possibly even doing DHCP<->DNS lookups so your private network can be resolvable for systems on it).
Chances are, your router will not have enough ports for your house, so you'll next probably need a switch or two. Honestly, switches are pretty simplistic and you shouldn't expect to pay too much for one of these.
Finally, if your house is decent sized you will probably want a few wifi booster or two. *Or*, if you want to subdivide your network a bit, possibly a second router (personally, I went with a second router with wifi as I could then isolate my guest and entertainment network from my home "work" network).
One last thing- dynamic dns. It's *terribly* helpful to be able to connect to your home network from the road. Personally, I have my SSH (and a few others) ports forwarded to a single home-network gateway in my home (which is just an older system running Debian) so I can remotely connect. For your actual dynamic dns'ing, there's places like DynDNS, but I personally have never liked them. I go with these guys http://freedns.afraid.org/ , and have been absolutely thrilled with them. They are free, but throw them some money anyway because they are awesome.
Hey Sam.
ReplyDeleteDo you use any wifi printers and nas?
I'm seriously considering keeping it simple by moving the wifi router someplace central upstairs (probably a closet that borders on the upstairs hallway) and putting a smart repeater (almost directly) downstairs so I can run ethernet to entertainment boxes. The upstairs->downstairs wifi would just be a way of avoiding wiring.
But if I was to run servers and desktop machines, I think I'd have to go with professional wiring here. Almost everywhere I want to go is on an external wall. It's a PITA.