Best practices for a new network?

[vnangia]

Hi folks, it's been a while!

Over the next few weeks, I'll be building out virtually an entirely new network at home because of a set of catastrophes (or series of unfortunate events, whichever). While a lot of the equipment will be reused, I figured I should ask this group of gurus if they have any tips to maximise speed and reliability of the network. The main purpose of the network will be to carry non-telephony data - mainly, audio and video streaming, transferring files to/from and backing up data on the main machines.

Some of the things I am considering: reintroducing a Windows client machine to serve as a DVR, a backup network connection.

I can provide a detailed list of hardware if you'd like, but are there any tips or tricks any of you have learnt (possibly, the hard way) that will help make this go more easily?

 

[Jeroen1000]

Yeah I have some things to share (just some random stuff, no particular order unless otherwise mentioned). I all kind of comes down to fairly good planning.

- Make an Excel sheet with important stuff on it: what is connected to which switch, how are the switches connected to each other, what is the IP of my router or switch (in case of a managed device), firmware versions, MAC-addresses, ...

- Do I want VLAN's. They require specific features on your swicthes.
- Do I go gigabit or not, take care grimping the connectors. Make sure you do it the right way. Your speed will suffer otherwise.
- Buy a regular cable tester. This way you can be reasonably sure your cable is grimped the correct way.
- Set aside an IP-range for those important devices (servers, managed switches, ...). Like 192.168.1.240 to 192.168.1.254.

- Reliability and speed can be maximised using redundant connections (like link aggregation). For servers you may want to look into nic bonding, teaming (it goes by many names). Your switches/server nic's are again required to support this feature.

- In case of mayhem devices with a good logging feature are a bliss

- Drivers for nic's can really drive you mad lol. I've noticed intel NIC's perform lots better than my onboard Atheros.