Summary

It was pure Internet Insanity at my house this weekend.  On Saturday I was looking at one of my Meraki MR18 access points and realized that it was not plugged into  the LAN via Ethernet.  In other words it was operating as a mesh repeater.  That situation really sucked given that it was only about 20 feet (through a wall) to the main LAN switch.

But it was even worse than it seemed because I had 20 years of networking equipment stacked up in my wiring closet.  Yes, my house has a wiring closet.  Doesn’t yours?  The first order of business was to yank it all out except the current stuff.  Check out this pile of old stuff.

Apparently over the years I have used about 7 different WiFI and Ethernet solutions.  How is that given that there hasn’t been that many 802.11s?  Hell if I know.  But this turned into a major major job.  Everywhere I looked there was a pile of wires.

And this insanity … you wouldn’t believe how many ethernet cables there were hidden in the cabinet…

So Nicholas and I headed to Lowes (actually 4 times) and got shelfs, wire zip ties etc.  Then I put him to work. My wiring closet is actually under the stairs, so he first installed rubber tiles on the floor.  Then a shelf, and finally reinstalled all of the networking gear.

Now things are much better on my network.  I use Meraki MR18’s which are 802.11ac radios.  They also have the ability to mesh with each other.  The three radios that you see in the picture with the green circle (not filled) are meshed into the network.

And my gigabit ethernet switch.

The MR18s can look at the spectrum usage… looks like 5ghz is basically empty.

While I was cleaning I found two of this cable… Ill bet you don’t know what it is…