[MLUG - DISCUSSION] home rewiring: the next to final chapter?

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

OK, so I finally got to run some cable this morning; pictures on the
web when I get the chance to put them up.  First, I would like to
thank everybody for advice, although, alas, not all of it could be
followed in this case.  In particular, there was really no way in
the world to run conduit of any reasonable dimension in my basement
ceiling, even almost completely stripped down.  And there is almost
no chance that anybody will ever be able to pull anything else
through the maze-like route I had to take in any case.  

The best I could do was to be redundant.  Redundancy was my best 
bet.

>From the outside going into the future wiring closet, I have two
pulls of RG-6QS (that stuff is *no* fun to work with) and two of
cat5e.  In both cases, the second one is there on spec (as it were).

>From the four downstairs locations of interest, I have two pulls of
cat5e and one of that miserable coax.  I had bought a good 4-way
splitter in my run to Home Depot, but it looks like down the road I
will need to go for possibly as many as 7 (when I get the upstairs
done); what would the best reasonably priced way to handle that be?

Getting to the cat5, I presume I can take the two cables and make
one into a standard phone line for now, and the other into an
ethernet port.  Then, whenever I need to, I can move the phone over
and use the whole second wire for whatever.  Or, is there any reason
to put everything in the one cable to start and save the second
"virgin" one for a rainy day?  If it helps any to know, I've got
two single gang boxes in all locations to play with.  OK, so to 
connect up the phones, I've got some choices to deal with.  Those of 
you who have seen my wiring hell (see:

  http://www.missouri.edu/~kingjw/wiring.html

know that my outside phone service is...primitive.  Should I just
suck it in and have GTE, ur Verizon, ur, whatever it's now called
install something that dates from the 80s or later?  Then, once that
end is connected up, what would be a reasonable and cost effective
way to split out the inside phone lines?  Originally, I'd thought
"patch panel", but it looks like that requires yet another different
set of tools (punch-down?) and is error-prone.  If that's the 
answer, I can put something together I think.  For the ethernet 
stuff, Misha Kovalenko convinced me it's just as easy to put in a 
double-gang box with a bunch of RJ-45 jacks wired up in it, and 
then just use patch cables to hook up to my switch/hub.  I guess 
there wouldn't be such a thing as a cheap and reliable telephone 
hub, would there?  (Yes, I'm naive...why do you ask?)

I know that another way to go with this is just to let Leviton 
products do absolutely everything, but that would cost hundreds of 
dollars, right?  (A quick google search also turned up an impressive 
looking product called the Future Smart SP08 Super Pro Panel; of 
course, if I had $1350 lying around somewhere, I wouldn't be writing 
this post...)

At the moment, it looks like I can do the faceplates in the various
rooms for surprisingly cheap using either Panduit or Hubbell stuff,
and nothing beats a TV splitter for the low cost cable TV 
distribution solution, but I'm less than sure about phones.

Oh yeah: a simple question.  How long a "tail" should I leave coming
out of the boxes before the drywall dudes come in?  I've got very 
very very long tails now, since I didn't want to screw up in the 
other direction, but I don't want stuff to get in the way...

jking






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