I have recently moved away from my past focus on installing various random OSes. I have now moved on to home networking. I currently have an 802.11b wireless LAN and a whole slew of computers in my home office. My office ends up getting overly cluttered which annoys me.
My new idea is to build a small datacenter in the basement. I spent the last few days running Cat 5e cable from my office to the basement. Once, I finish the wiring, I will move my servers downstairs and my primary home networking router as well.
The big question everyone asks me is why I wired to the basement and did not use wireless. The reality is that 802.11b and g are good technologies, but they cannot compete with good old 100BT when it comes to throughput. Since I have a NAS server down there, I wanted to make sure that I received the maximum throughput. Another issue is that I already have a housefull of 802.11b stuff and do not want to spend the money to upgrade to G. Why upgrade? B and G do not co-exist all that nicely with the result being that the entire network would run at woefully slow B speeds.