[Gllug] The netwroked house - a terminal in every room >;)

[Steven Goodwin]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 06:12:23PM +0000, M.Blackmore wrote:
> One of our Oxluggy number is busy renovating our new house in Charlbury 
> and we have been discussing what sort of comms wire to run - and how to 
> put a "terminal" in every room (well, a number of rooms) in the most 
> economical manner.

I can only comment on the cabling front, which is a bit egg sucky, but
anyway...

I'd run a minimum of 2 cat-5 cables to every room. They should all
return to a main server room (aka node zero) to whatever switch/patchbay
you have available. Then load balance one or more servers here.

If you want a AV room, run at least 4, preferably 8.

The rule in HA (home automation) is that think of twice the maximum
number of sockets you'll need...then double it. There are several
sites/lists that deal in HA that cover this.

The idea behind *2* cat-5 is that you can run non-IP data along them
(e.g. phone lines, low power, audio, TV signals) so one line can be used for
that, while the other is fed direct into a switch/router.

> But to the "terminals". Rather than sink money into a number of new 
> personal computers, the idea would be to sink money once into a recent 

LTSP would help for most info terminals since the load on the backend
server is minimal (you might have 10 terminals, but if there's only 4
people in the house you won't overload it). I'd look for laptops
with dead batteries (that no one wants to replace) as they're the most
convienent for mounting/hiding. Consider a touch-screen for the kitchen PC.

I'm probably way OT by now, and so will stop now! I'm more focused on
the HA feature/usability front so anything on that side I can help with.


Steev

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