Transitioning networking equipment to a new home

[trueislander]

Hi Guys,
I’ve got a home network setup question for you experts. I’ve moved into a house that has Cat6 cables run to most of the rooms in the house. They’ve been properly terminated (seemingly) in the rooms via wall plates and in the office closet via a 16 port Cat6 patch panel.

Short of paying someone to check it out, is there any way I can check the existing Ethernet wiring job to see if it was done correctly?

What I’m bringing:
Netgear WNDR3700 Gigabit WiFi
Netgear JGS524 24 Port Unmanaged Gigabit Switch
Netgear FVS318v3 VPN Firewall w/ 8 Port 100Mbps Switch
Thecus 4100Pro NAS
Cable Modem (haven’t gotten service yet, but will be 15M Down/2M-Up from Charter Cable)
Usual gadgets (Win7 Laptops, Squeezebox, AppleTV (XBMC), Boxee Box, DirecTV DVR’s, PS3, Droids)

So my main question is: What is the best way to connect everything so the WiFi gadgets can see the Wired ones within the network? Let me know if I'm looking at any major pitfalls here. I’ve got a theoretical idea of how it might be setup, but you guys are the experts. So onward and upward my fellow enthusiasts!

Thanks, Trey

 

[thiggins]

Why the two routers? Which one is going to be your primary router connected to the cable modem?

Buy a cheap cable tester like this one to check the cable runs.

 

[trueislander]

The Firewall Router was a holdover from before I bought the Gigabit switch. Also the Firewall Router supposedly handles VPN very well, but setting that up would be a question for a different thread.

The WiFi router is replacing a (finally) broken down Linsys WRT. Should I scrap the Firewall Router until I decide to setup VPN?

 

[thiggins]

As long as you have one wireless router all your wired and wireless clients will be able to talk to each other fine.

If you decide to add in the FVS318v3 , convert the WNDR3700 to an access point. See
How To Convert a Wireless Router into an Access Point