Suggestions For Broadband Networking At Home. Options

[Cooldude]

Hi folks. Howdy.

I've just finished with the purchase of my new apartment. I have started with the flooring & interior civil work for now.

I need to plan the electrical wiring of my new house. The house includes four bedrooms & two living rooms. I need all rooms to have a broadband connection that can used for accessing by plugging a laptop. One bedroom would have a desktop. There shall be two broadband connections provided by the local cable operator. I need these connections to be accessible in all 4 bedrooms by means of an ethernet cable & in the 2 living rooms (one above the other, separated by a floor) by Wi-Fi. I plan to keep two Wi-Fi routers respectively in the living rooms for wireless access.

To begin with, what sort of cables should be used to distribute the broadbands to all rooms? Secondly what hardware would be best for me wherein the two broadband connections (from the cable operator) would be plugged in, which in turn would be distributed to all rooms? By saying hardware, I mean a gadget similar in lines of an EPABX system that distributes one or more telephone lines to multiple locations. Here instead of telephone its broadband.

I also wish to have site filters, parental controls & the provision to block internet access to any room at anytime.

Please guide me here. Thanks.

[speculatrix]

I use an adsl modem in "half bridge" mode at home, so that my linux router/firewall gets the real IP address.

A while ago when my heating system needed replacing I also wired whole house with cat5e - I used foil-shielded twisted pair (STP) as it's tougher and keeps down interference - FM radio here is not so strong. I've even managed to push composite video down it and S/PDIF digital audio with some degradation! The cost of a 305m box of STP was instead of UTP was perhaps US$40 or so extra. I'm not using shielded patch leads or patch panels, but at least the option is there.

My wireless is on an isolated network (DMZ) completely separate from the cabled network, as I have wifi devices that can't do WPA, so they get a different set of access permissions. If I need access to the main lan I can either tunnel over ssh or use openvpn.. but mostly I just jack in to the nearest cat5e socket!

Since everything has to go through the linux box I can be totally fascist with network control:
* squid proxy with everything logged
* local smtp server with TLS enabled
* local imap server, using fetchmail to retrieve email from provider
* nothing allowed to talk directly to outside world except s-imap email and s-pop.
* nothing comes in except from my work IP address, or openvpn traffic, unless I use port knocking which opens SSH temporarily.

I could even stop Skype connecting (which is quite a feat) until I specifically mapped some ports for it for individual PCs.

Any linux will do for this, but since the PC will be on all the time you want to use something as low power as possible!

Paul