A Minor Home Network Upgrade

Why Did I Need an Upgrade?

There have been a couple of things which have conspired to push me to making a major upgrade to my home network. These reasons included:

• My MyBookWorld (terrabyte) was starting to run out of space,
• The 10/100 ether net ports on the Netgear DGN2000 were starting to “fall apart”. I was getting them erroring out, not working at all, and generally “stuffing up” when trying to access the network resources.
• I’d reached the 4 port limit on the integrated router/modem.
• The N wireless connections were starting to get a bit flaky as well.

The summary the network was turning into a “not work”.

So with “money in hand”, time to make an upgrade.

The  Upgrade Objectives

The upgrade to the home network had a couple of objectives:

• Make things stable again. I’ve had enough of thing working for a short while and then loosing the network mappings, or the internet.
• Modularise the network elements. The modular design should position things so that if one elements of the network starts getting “wobbly”, I can replace that one component.
• Make space for some more NAS storage. The 4 ports on the old router were full before I started to think about adding more NAS to the network.

The Upgrade Components

• Replace the 10/100 hard wired/ether net parts of the network with an 8 port 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet switch (Netgear GS108). That solved the hardwired part of the networking, and made space for the next block of network storage.
• Add an ADSL Modem (getting away from the all in one unit which was starting to get flaky). This was a Netgear DM111P.
• Add a 802.11N Wireless Router (I connect my notebooks to the network using wireless). This was a Netgear WRN3500. The important part of this was that there it is a 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet interface out.
• Add another 2T of NAS storage. This time I’m using a LaCie d2 Network 2 2T drive. A very solid aluminium cased piece of storage.

Outcome and Interesting Features

So far, so good. Things have been holding together. The network has been taking a “hammering” as I move stuff off the MyBookWorld and onto the LaCie drive.

Setting up the Netgear did not cause too much of a headache. The order I used was to setup the modem first, then the N router. The N router seems to have aggregated the modem (the router looks like it is controlling the modem as well). So, setting up both at once may have been possible.

Moving Files (an aside)

I’ve been using a combination of Windows Explorer, and Dos xcopy. Xcopy is something which seems to give a better degree of control over copy process, and seems to be quick (when compared to Windows Explorer).