So this weekend I finally did the thing I've been putting off since basically August: sorted out the home network properly instead of living with the janky setup that's been held together with hope and one very stressed-out power strip.
Backstory for anyone who's new here (hi, both of you) — I've been running a Linksys router from like 2008 that I bought used off a coworker for twenty bucks, and it has been, generously, "fine." It drops the wifi maybe twice a day. It hates my roommate's laptop specifically, for reasons nobody has ever been able to explain. And it definitely does not do gigabit, which didn't matter until I started actually caring about moving big files around the apartment.
The actual trigger for all this was that I've accumulated something like 400GB of photos and random backups spread across two external drives, a dead laptop's hard drive I never wiped, and a USB stick I'm scared to lose. That's not a backup strategy, that's a hoarding problem. So I picked up a cheap two-bay enclosure and dropped in two 2TB drives, mirrored, and now I have an actual NAS sitting in the closet instead of drives rattling around in a drawer.
the router saga
I did not budget nearly enough time for the router part of this. I figured I'd just get a new one, plug it in, done in twenty minutes. Ha.
Went with a Netgear this time, one of the ones that actually advertises gigabit LAN ports, which apparently a lot of the sub-$60 routers still don't bother with in 2011, which is insane to me. Setup itself was easy enough. The part that ate my whole Saturday afternoon was that the thing kept dropping the connection to the NAS specifically, and it took embarrassingly long to figure out it was a DHCP lease issue, not a hardware problem. I gave the NAS a static IP and it's been rock solid since. Should've just done that first instead of unplugging and replugging cables like an idiot for two hours.
Also — small aside — why do all consumer routers still ship with the admin password as "admin"? I get that it's for setup, but I bet half the routers in my building are still sitting on the default. Anyway. Changed mine. You should change yours.
cables, or, my new least favorite hobby
The other half of this weekend was cable management, which I did not expect to be the emotionally exhausting part but here we are. My "network closet" is actually just the bottom shelf of a hallway closet, and before this weekend it looked like a plate of spaghetti had a fight with a plate of more spaghetti. I picked up a pack of velcro cable ties (way better than the zip-tie kind, you can actually reuse them when you inevitably mess up the routing) and a cheap little shelf bracket thing to get the NAS up off the floor so it's not sitting directly on carpet.
It took way longer than it should have because I insisted on labeling every single cable with masking tape and a Sharpie, which past-me is going to thank present-me for the next time something breaks at 11pm and I don't want to trace four cables by hand. My roommate walked by at one point while I was on the floor with my head basically inside the closet and just said "you good?" and kept walking. Fair.
End result: everything's up off the ground, the NAS has its own shelf, and I can actually open the closet door without something falling out. Small victories.
is it actually better
Yes, genuinely. I ran a quick transfer test moving a folder of RAW photos (about 6GB worth) from my laptop to the NAS over wifi and it finished in a couple minutes instead of the fifteen-plus it would've taken before, back when I was doing this over the old router hunched over like it personally offended the router to be asked to move data. Streaming to the living room TV box hasn't stuttered once, which it used to do constantly, especially anything encoded above like 720p.
I still need to set up an actual backup schedule instead of just remembering to drag files over manually, and I want to look at whether I can get the NAS doing scheduled backups on its own instead of me babysitting it. That's a project for another weekend though. For now I'm just enjoying not hating my own apartment's wifi for the first time in about three years.
Also somehow spent $140 total on this whole thing between the router, the enclosure, and cable stuff, which honestly feels like a steal compared to what I was expecting to pay.