Network cabinet

Or, What to do with that stupid cabinet above the fridge.

Cabinet currently houses surge protector, cable modem, wireless access point, Hue hub. I’ll probably run an Ethernet cable to the desk where the laptop lives.

Drilled a 1.5″ hole through the bottom for the power & coax cords.

Have to keep an eye on the temperatures before I add more devices in there. A NAS appliance is probably coming in the future.

This cabinet is as close as possible to the geometric center of the building. I got solid signal throughout the first and second floors, though I imagine there will be a dead spot in the basement below the fridge.

******2020 Update******

This was a terrible idea.

I believe that the router & music drive died due to heat.

The router started going stupid whenever the wife & I watched TV, but not when the kids were using the network for school & streaming cartoons. I thought we were overloading it & bought a new router. The music drive wouldn’t work on the new router & I assumed that the manufacturer had a bad USB 3.0 controller that wouldn’t speak to a USB 2.0 device.

I bought a NAS to replace the music drive and the USB ports on it refused to recognize the drive. It’s more likely that the drive is damaged than I got four bad USB ports on two devices from two reputable manufacturers.

I suspect heat because –

1) two devices became increasingly unreliable and then died.

2) The drives on the NAS have internal temperature sensors. They both read 120 degrees F first thing in the morning after sitting overnight.

The plan is to replace the cabinet doors with two perforated units and add a fan to keep the temperature inside the cabinet lower.

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