Interesting - thank you. Has anyone used it?
Always put in the most āfuture-proofā wiring you can. Iāve had an Ethernet LAN at home for about 25 years. The computers were connected together using daisy-chained coax (10BASE2, 2Mb/sec!). The wiring still goes through our attic!
No reason to have ever pulled it out!
Our modem for Internet access was a ārealā modem. We had a computer that acted as the router. When someone would open a browser, that computer would dial the provider (I used an IBM service at the time) and make the connection at 56kbps down.
It all has been upgraded a lot over the years, next to DSL in 1999 (commercial service, no domestic service back then). Originally 256k down, 64k up, guaranteed, and cost $50/month. The speed went up 3x and the cost went down 2x (amazing!) over the years. Then I was able to jump to Fiber in 2008 and skip using a cable provider.
if you donāt know where all the cables are going get a VDV (Voice Data Video) Device and itāll let you tone each cable and map what room they are in. Knowing where everything is going/coming is half the battle.
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Great episode @MacSparky & @ismh !
For those wanting to monitor network performance (latency, jitter, & loss), I created a home bridge plugin, taking inspiration from Dave Hamiltonās 3-Ping Strategy (patent pending), that will āpingā multiple locations (within the LAN as well as beyond). The results are presented via Home Kit by using/abusing Carbon Dioxide sensors. I have found this helpful in identifying whether network issues are within the LAN (or specific parts of it) or are on the ISP/public side of the fence.
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And now that I look at the Read Me and actually read itā¦I found another typo: comfiguration
I just bought a house (our first, actually) and ripped out all the coax cables going from room to room because I found them unsightly. Perhaps I should not have done thatā¦
If they were coax for Cable TV, it would have worked for MoCA, letting you run Ethernet signals over it instead of having to run wires. I made use of an existing Cable TV cable to bring wired Ethernet to a location in the house that had that wiring and I would have dreaded to have made at CAT-6 run.
Turns out MoCA would not have been an option with my current provider, who disable it in their cable modems. That being said, the previous owner had wired the coax cables to the primary bedroom, the rec room, and the living room, and none of those are high-priority ethernet spaces for me anyway, so I still would have had to re-wire everything anyway. At this point, it would likely be cheaper for me to upgrade my Eero base station to the new 6 Pro for gigabit-speed wifi.
We just moved Saturday and Iāve not had time to listen to this episode yet, but Iām very much looking forward to it, given the topic at hand.
How? MoCA is a local solution. Has nothing to do with your (cable) modem. It basically uses an ethernet port from your router (or modem/router) and āinjectsā this signal into your local coax cable.
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I am trying to figure out how to put all my pieces together. I have the modem/router combo from my ISP, plus a number of hubs and various tidbits. Right now, they are all just hanging out on the floor in a corner of the living room where the ethernet plugs in. I would love to have a dedicated closet, but thatās not in the cards in this house. Does anyone have a portable solution they use and like? Should I get a little dedicated cabinet? I would love to see pictures of network closets/cabinets that people have put together. Iād like to get mine in better order. Thanks!
So I just googled to specifically find it, but they disable MoCA with a filter of some sorts on their modems, and force you into using adapters to make it happen. Either way, itās a little late for me ā Iāve already cut all the wires out of the house.
ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
This is awesome creativity!
When we moved into this house in 2017, our son (15 at the time) had coax and a phone jack in his bedroom, which would have made him the envy of all of my friends in the late 1980s.
Instead, he looked at the coax cable sticking out of the wall, and asked āIs that what they used in ye olden days for the phone?ā
We ended up cutting out the coax, and the unused phone jack was sat empty behind a bookcase.
Now, where did I put my cane and AARP subscription?
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When I was a network engineer, iperf was my go to tool for this. Simple, free, cross platform, but itās command line based.
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I definitely have a different take on port forwarding than the guys, but I understand the concerns. I had to go down this road initially since getting Plex accessible from the internet required that I manually specify ports in Plex and forward them. I now use screen sharing (Appleās own), Plex, and SFTP/SSH all the time from work, mobile, etc. My tips:
Get a custom domain from a provider that supports dynamic DNS, and then run DDNS Broker on your Mac to keep it updated. Technically I use a subdomain. So while, say, blah.com would be a site that I have, hmmm.blah.com would go to my home IP address. Not the real domains.
Similarly, before you set up your port forwarding rules, assign your server a permanent internal IP address. That way if your device reboots and gets a new IP address, you donāt have to update your rules. My router does not know about Bonjour local domains (like mediaserver.local). Also now when I SSH into my media server from my local network I just use the internal address instead of wondering if the local domain will work in every context.
Then, and this is a security consideration, donāt actually open the normal ports, which bots scan for. So while my server has port 22 open for SSH, externally itās an arbitrary number. I just have to remember to specify it when accessing remotely. I do the same for everything open on the internetādifferent external-facing vs. internal-facing ports.
Oh, and in apps like Screens, I will usually add two entries, one with the local IP address to use when at home, another with the custom domain for when Iām remote. I donāt know if accessing local resources via the domain would route internal traffic out to the internet and back or not. But, why risk it?
Some of the reasons I do this:
My home media server is available in the Files app on iPhone/iPad via Secure Shellfish, a great app that can basically do the iOS equivalent of mounting a remote share.
Because my files are being shared by SFTP, many apps (e.g. nPlayer) can just play videos etc that are on my file server directly. Maybe this works with SMB tooāI donāt knowābut SMB strikes me as best for local shares. Also I like to log in via SSH sometimes to do terminal stuff, and you canāt do that otherwise.
Because I am using Appleās built-in VNC server, I can just use the Screen Sharing app on Macs. I use Screens on iOS (which I couldnāt do if I used, say, Splashtop) and some random free VNC client on Windows.
Finally, this system is easily expandable to make more resources available remotely, and I donāt have to worry about apps like Screens Connect or Splashtop that try to punch a hole out to the internet without opening a port. Iāve not found those to be 100% reliable.
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Thanx @tjluoma. I have another plug-in that uses a similar trick using Battery Status services to report how full various volumes are on a Mac.
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I started doing this years ago. In this case, security through obscurity works. I used to be hit by bots every couple of seconds on port 22. It would even occasionally cause the ssh server to crash from being overloaded with requests! Since moving it there has been no hits at all. The bots just donāt waste their time trying every port number.
Thumbs up for all your other suggestions as well.
I prefer to hid my tech as much as possible so my cable modem is stuffed under a 5 drawer dresser and my router (a small cube that doubles as a clock) sets on top. And most wires are kept out of sight by gaffer tape. Most consumer tech isnāt very heat sensitive so IMO, if it doesnāt have air vents you can normally put it just about anywhere.
I suggest you test your WiFi before you decide on a permanent location for your router. Having to move all your wires, etc. after you get them looking just right is a royal pain.
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Fortunately, Iām immune to the siren song of WiFi 6 and 1GB internet connections. Iām not a big movie fan so my iPad Pro and 13 year old Plasma TV are happy with a 120 Mbps pipe.
But Apple gets most of the money that I donāt send to Comcast. 
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Still much more than you really need (for streaming, at least). I see only 5 Mbps used by our TV.