Hey guys!
Quick background: I'm 22, and work in IT supporting Windows-based systems in medical environments (a lot of the executives run Macs, and there has been some effort towards moving everything we do towards being platform agnostic).
I just recently (i.e. closed last week) bought my first house.
With the economy and depressed local housing market, I was able to get an excellent price. That said, I need to do a lot of work on the house, including quite a bit of electrical work (some parts of the house have knob-and-tube wiring that needs to be removed). Additionally, the rather spacious upstairs is completely unfinished, so I'm going to frame out and build a bathroom, second living room, and bedroom.
Since I need electrical work done downstairs, and there is no drywall upstairs yet; I figure now is the perfect time to get the house ready for my future uses, from a tech perspective. I wanted to see if those of you here had any suggestions.
For starters, I picked up a 24-port patch panel and a gigabit switch, and am going to wire up the house with CAT6 cable. I'm planning to build a cheap PC to set up with RAID 5 and several 1- or 2-TB hard drives, and install FreeNAS and share it across the network (possibly also using it as a proxy server, VPN server, FTP server, and UPnP server to my PS3/Wii running homebrew).
I don't know much about sound systems. Does a surround sound setup require cabling behind the drywall? Are HDMI cables flexible enough to be run around corners well?
Does anyone have any suggestions as to any other things I could do before I get the drywall up?
Thanks all
Quick background: I'm 22, and work in IT supporting Windows-based systems in medical environments (a lot of the executives run Macs, and there has been some effort towards moving everything we do towards being platform agnostic).
I just recently (i.e. closed last week) bought my first house.
With the economy and depressed local housing market, I was able to get an excellent price. That said, I need to do a lot of work on the house, including quite a bit of electrical work (some parts of the house have knob-and-tube wiring that needs to be removed). Additionally, the rather spacious upstairs is completely unfinished, so I'm going to frame out and build a bathroom, second living room, and bedroom.
Since I need electrical work done downstairs, and there is no drywall upstairs yet; I figure now is the perfect time to get the house ready for my future uses, from a tech perspective. I wanted to see if those of you here had any suggestions.
For starters, I picked up a 24-port patch panel and a gigabit switch, and am going to wire up the house with CAT6 cable. I'm planning to build a cheap PC to set up with RAID 5 and several 1- or 2-TB hard drives, and install FreeNAS and share it across the network (possibly also using it as a proxy server, VPN server, FTP server, and UPnP server to my PS3/Wii running homebrew).
I don't know much about sound systems. Does a surround sound setup require cabling behind the drywall? Are HDMI cables flexible enough to be run around corners well?
Does anyone have any suggestions as to any other things I could do before I get the drywall up?
Thanks all
