Playing with Powerline Ethernet
I was out in Lidl a few months back and picked up a pair of powerline ethernet adapters for €40. Our house is a couple of hundred years old and has walls that are around half a metre thick. This means that my wireless access point is inaccessible in some parts of the house so I figured that the powerline adapters would be perfect to setup an access point at the other end of the house. My cunning plan worked much better than I hoped for.
A quick bandwith test with my laptop connected directly to the adapter gave transfer rates of 40Mbit when copying an iso image from one of my file servers. I hooked up the access point and all was well. Latency is quite good too and the transfer rates have been consistent. All told I was pleased.
However as I now have so much equipment crammed into such a small room here at home, things have been getting a little toasty and with the addition of a Dell Poweredge 1750 humming along with my Poweredge 2800 things have been getting exceptionally noisy as well. There is only one course of action and that is to move them out of my computer room to somewhere else. Unfortunately there is nowhere else in the house to put them as the noise is very hard to escape from.
The only option I could think of is a garage that we own which is about 250m from our house. It is nice and dry, secure and more importantly cool so it would be pretty safe to install a rack in there. Unfortunately it is too far to run an ethernet cable too and I don’t have line of sight to set up a wireless connection. But the garage is connected to our domestic electricity supply so I figured I would do a quick test to see if my cheap powerline ethernet connectors would work up there.
Armed with my laptop and one of the adapters I headed off to the garage and plugged in. Almost instantly the adapter found its partner back at home and my laptop picked up its IP address and lo and behold I was now connected to my LAN.
Browsing the net seemed very snappy indeed but if I was going to install a rack there I needed to find out if I would have enough bandwidth there to make it worth my while. So I downloaded the same iso image that I used for my first test and was mildly surprised with the results. The transfer rate as I thought it would had dropped significantly but it is a solid 12Mbit which is quite usable indeed.
My plan is to move my web and mail servers up there and keep my file servers back in my home office. All I need now is a rack!
