A.2 Planning and Preparation

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Because they all happened at the same time the move to Martha's Vineyard, the renovations on the house, and the creation of the Vineyard.NET Internet service provider they are all intractably tangled together in my mind. Repairing the roof, building a new bathroom, pulling Category 5 network cables to every room, and putting in special grounded outlets for the ISP's computers were all items on the short list of things that needed to be done to make the house habitable. A few months later, when we realized that we had bitten off more than we could chew, the ISP was simply one more reason why we couldn't just leave.

I got Bill Bennett's name out of the phone book. He's an electrician on Martha's Vineyard who had a big advertisement boasting "home theater" and "smart house" systems. Truth be told, Bill is more interested in electronics than electrics. He seemed like an ideal person to help with the wide assortment of electrical tasks that we needed. Bill took the job. He also pointed me to Eric Bates, a carpenter who was also running the computer systems for the town of Oak Bluffs.

Eric moved to Martha's Vineyard after graduating from Dartmouth College. He wanted to crew on the Shenandoah, a topsail schooner in the Vineyard Haven Harbor. Eric went from being boat crew to being a carpenter, and he had been doing that for most of the past decade. Eric had been into computers for years he even owned one of the original Macintosh computers. But Eric wasn't simply a user, he was a hardcore power geek.

Eric was also the CIO for the town of Oak Bluffs, which meant that he had a part-time job running the town's rag-tag collection of Macs, PCs, and a Unix box. To make this menagerie work together, Eric set up one of the first municipal TCP/IP networks in the country. For years Eric had wanted to set up an Internet connection on the island, but something had always gotten in the way.

Eric and I met and quickly became friends. The idea of a small Internet buyer's club appealed to both of us, and we quickly settled on the name Vineyard Cooperative Networks.

Meanwhile, Bennett Electric had started rewiring the house. It was a big job. The only electricity distribution in the house were a few outlets on the first floor and a few lamps hanging from the ceilings in the second floor bedrooms, all powered by ancient knob-and-tube wiring. Although knob-and-tube is relatively safe as long as you don't touch it, it would never do for the kind of computer equipment that I was thinking of installing.

Bill decided that the best approach would be to pull a 60-amp service from the basement to the second floor and to wire a second panel upstairs. We also wanted to pull Category 5 twisted pairs to every room on every floor, so we could put computers wherever we wanted. And we wanted a traditional four-wire red, green, yellow, black cable to every room for the telephones. The easiest thing to do, we discovered, was to cut 200-foot lengths for all of the wires, bundle them all together with electrician's tape, and pull the whole thing up along one of our chimneys from the basement into the attic. From the attic there were drops into the individual second-floor rooms. The first floor was wired up from the basement. This whole process took two people the better part of a week. When it was done, the house was probably the most wired structure on the island.

A.2.1 Lesson: Whenever you are pulling wires, pull more than you need.

This wiring lesson is well-known in the business world, but it's not very well understood by people who are new to business, or who have only wired residences. Wire is cheap; labor is expensive. So always pull more than you need. Then, when your needs expand, you are prepared.

We made the mistake of pulling a Category 5 and a telephone wire to each room. We figured that we could always use an Ethernet hub to make more Ethernet jacks appear in a room for laptops and the like, and we knew that we would never need more than four wires for the telephone four wires would handle two telephone lines, and if we ever wanted more than two lines, we would simply get a PBX switch.

In retrospect, we were very wrong. All of those little hubs are a pain to operate: you have to plug them in, get little patch cords, and then they are always running into problems. It's far better to have two or three network connections to each room one for a desktop, one for a laptop, and one for a guest. If you ever need a plug, there it is.

What's worse, three years after the initial wiring, we purchased a used Merlin 820 telephone system for the house. Total cost was $500 for the system's "brain" and 20 extensions a real bargain! But the Merlin system, it turned out, uses four pairs of wire instead of two. The upshot is that most of the Category 5 wire that we originally pulled now services the telephones, not the network, and many rooms can have either a phone or a network, but not both. Tremendously annoying.

A.2.2 Lesson: Pull all your wires in a star configuration, from a central point out to each room, rather than daisy-chained from room to room. Wire both your computers and your telephone networks as stars. It makes it much easier to expand or rewire in the future.

Many residences are wired with a single telephone line that snakes in the walls from room to room. This makes it almost impossible to add more than two lines to a house. By pulling each room's telephone line to the basement, we made it easy to put one phone line in one room and another phone line in another room. We run these POTS^[A] lines for faxes or extra modems (useful for testing) in parallel with the Merlin 820.

^[A] POTS stands for Plain Old Telephone Service; it's a common abbreviation for analog telephone lines.

A.2.3 Lesson: Use centrally located punch-down blocks for computer and telephone networks.

Before we installed the phone switch, we were constantly changing which telephone lines appeared in which room. To make this job easier, we purchased modular telephone extenders at RadioShack that had a single RJ11 male telephone jack and five female RJ11 plugs. Each telephone extender was put on a different outside line. We could then move telephones around by simply unplugging RJ11 jacks from one module and plugging them into another.

This use of RJ11 jacks was easy enough, but it was space inefficient. What's worse, it was unreliable: RJ11 jacks would occasionally wiggle out of their plug modeling without any indication.

Finally, we ripped out the RJ11s and instead set up a conventional punch-down block for the telephone service. Prior to the arrival of the phone switch, we could establish the dial tones we wanted in each room by simply changing the punch-down configuration. After we got the switch, we still used the punch-down blocks for the residential modem lines, fax lines, and other analog dial tones, as they were needed.

A.2.4 Lesson: Don't go overboard.

We decided against pulling dark fiber along with the Category 5 wires. That's because Category 5 could go at speeds up to 100 Mbits/sec at the time. We couldn't imagine that this would not be fast enough during the time that we would have the house. If we were going to need to have an optical gigabit or ATM network, we would simply have to put it all in the basement!

As it turns out, we were right. The industry didn't move to using fiber optics inside offices. Instead, Category 5/5e/6 became the norm. Five years later, 100 Mbps was common, and gigabit over copper was getting cheap.

A.2.5 Lesson: Plan your computer room carefully; you will have to live with its location for a long time.

Another decision that we made was to put all of the computer and telephone equipment in the basement, rather than in one of the upstairs rooms. We had a lot of reasons for wanting to do this. First and foremost: we didn't want to give up the living space. We also imagined that there would be a lot of people going to and from the machine room, and didn't want them to interfere with the people living up above. The basement had a separate entrance, which became increasingly important as the number of employees in the company expanded.

One problem with the basement, though, was that the floor got pretty wet whenever it rained. We "solved" this problem by building a small computer room within the basement that was on a raised cement slab. That gave us six inches of flood insurance.

Actually, the raised cement slab was largely unintentional. When we bought the house, there was some sort of root cellar in part of the basement. The room had paperboard walls, a dirt floor, and even a dead rat. So we removed the rat, ripped out the walls, poured our own concrete slab, and Eric built a nice stud wall which we finished with plywood and a beautiful handmade door. We ended up with a room that was reasonably secure and moderately dry. It even had a window: a fan provided low-cost cooling in the winter, and a window-mounted air conditioner gave us all the cooling we needed in the summer.

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