Singapore Expats

What setup do you have?

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Steve1960
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What setup do you have?

Post by Steve1960 » Sat, 09 Aug 2014 4:19 pm

This came to mind following Strong Eagles post on network storage. I would like to hear how your home network is set up so that it might give me some ideas on how to improve mine as I am no IT expert and I know we have some here.

So to kick off with my setup and the issues I have:

Service provider is Singtel with 200Mbps fibre. Connected via the Singtel router which I would like to change for a better model but I am a little nervous about doing it as I have MIO TV and I am lead to believe the setup of a third party router to make MIO TV work is a little complex. If anyone has experience of doing this I would appreciate the advice.

Singtel router connected directly via Cat 5e cables to the MIO TV box, Smart DVD player (which we rarely ever use now) and an 8 port unmanaged switch.

The unmanaged switch is connected to the following via Cat 5e cables. UK TV VPN box, Apple TV box, living room Smart TV, Apple time Capsule, one of those wifi boxes that uses the apartment power supply circuit, supplying hard wiring to our daughters bedroom, supplying hard wiring to the living room office area. The Apple TC has a 1TB USB hard drive hanging off it for backup of photographs and video. The TC itself can be used to backup my wife's Macbook Air but you can't copy files to it as if it was a hard drive. Strange that!

I put the power supply WiFi connection in our bedroom for my wife, there are 3 metal partition walls between the living room router and the bedroom so there is virtually no signal at all and i didn't want to move the router. It's still not that good though partly because I have to connect the sender unit to an extension lead not directly to a wall socket. No choice unfortunately.

In our daughters bedroom there is a 5 port unmanaged switch connected to the second Smart TV and the second Apple TV box.

There is a 5 port unmanaged switch on the far side of the living room for my home office. Only one Ethernet connection to the Belkin thunderbolt hub, just wanted to allow for expansion. The hub has an external DVD writer, JBL speaker, printer, iPad connection, Thunderbolt external storage and Thunderbolt to laptop.

I have 3 WiFi networks which seem to co exist fine. The Singtel router and the Apple Time Capsules 802.11ac. Me and the wife connect via the Apple TC and have access to all the drives on the network. Our daughter, the maid and any visitors connect via the Singtel router and do not have access to our network drives. Third one is the bedroom power circuit already mentioned above.

Slightly aside from the network setup. My daughters iPad gen 4 often has connection problems with the Apple TV box. The hour glass just turns and turns and nothing happens. Sometimes switching off the iPad or the Apple TV box gets it going but not always. Any ideas?

The one observation I do have is that the more complex one makes their home network the more maintenance it needs! These days I am not sure if I need a maid or a network administrator
:lol:

x9200
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Post by x9200 » Sun, 10 Aug 2014 7:15 pm

http://forum.singaporeexpats.com/ftopic ... asc-0.html

It's a 1.5yo thread but still mostly valid. The functionality is still the same, capacity increased, the server's mb was replaced by a low power mb, no home plugs any longer replaced by cat6 cabling.

Steve1960
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Post by Steve1960 » Mon, 11 Aug 2014 2:49 pm

Excellent thank you very interesting reading. It will take me some time to digest it all!

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durain
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Post by durain » Mon, 11 Aug 2014 6:09 pm

you sure you not an IT expert???!!! i had to read your post a few time just to virtualise your setup. :)

if your broadband is fast enough and getting a good wifi signal but getting drop connection, check the wifi "channel" on your wireless router. you might want to play around with that in case everyone around you are using the same channel. DECT cordless phones might be using that channels as well.

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