One of the things I kick myself for not doing when we remodeled the house, and had an electrician handy, is add an Ethernet port or two to the garage.

I have two reasons for wanting Ethernet to the garage.

One is some lofty idea of moving my (noisy and warm) server infrastructure to the garage, where the noise and heat won’t be a bother. This has a couple of other downsides beyond noise and heat, like power security and dirt, that would also need to be addressed. Between the two big servers there are six big power supplies, plus potential little servers, plus switches and monitors to support the systems. A little room could be built to provide some protection from people and dirt, with some mindfulness to allowing heat to vent and protection from bugs and mice, and the like. All too much for the bits of tiny data and nonsense I really should just push to cloud servers. There’s something about controlling your own bare metal, though.

The other, much more pragmatic reason is that I have a wireless Ring camera spotlight on the alley-side of the garage, which is too far away from the house to reliably connect to the WiFi. I’d also like a little more reliable WiFi coverage in the yard.

So to the second end, I started with a WiFi extender. It allowed connecting via the WiFi in the house from the near-side of the garage, and then extended the WiFi to the far side, a mere 15 more feet, with a stronger-enough signal for the camera to work. It worked, but has some troubles.

The first is that it would be the case that devices would use the garage WiFi instead of the house WiFi. Probably poorly, but because it’s where the Internet terminates, the WiFi is in the basement. In a corner of the basement that is kind of mid-way through the house (some of the house was extended after the original construction, but the basement wasn’t). Everything in the basement is over by the HVAC gear, so there’s lots of duct and conduit, plumbing and framing in the way. It’s also where all of the previously discussed bare metal sits. Because of this, sometimes devices would connect to the garage and then that connection to the basement would struggle, and then those devices, with otherwise strong signals, would not have any Internet connection.

So I’ve augmented the network with my first Ethernet-over-power gear. I’d tried such things in the past, but they were spotty at best, and frustrating as a norm. I read more than plenty of reviews and articles about the easiest way to get Ethernet to detached garages, and the recommendations pointed to the line of EoP equipment that I eventually got. 

The idea is simple enough, the device converts the Ethernet signal to something on your home (or office) power line, and then another device takes that signal and turns it back into Ethernet, and back again. This is mired with all manner of difficulties, including surge suppressors, circuit breakers, noisy equipment, and so on. For the purposes of the garage, and given the reviews and updates to the technology, I figured it was worth a couple twenty-dollar bills to try.

The adapter pair arrived today. I plugged one in to my basement outlet and into the router. I plugged the other into the garage outlet and WiFi extender. I stood with my phone and the WiFi control app at the ready. After the lights started blinking, my phone got a nice strong signal from the WiFi, with Internet, and the app reported the extender was connected via Ethernet!

It happened that the garage camera was reporting itself off-line (well, the Ring service was reporting the camera off-line), but it shortly came back and filled in the gap as best it could.

The speed reports GB, which is more than adequate. I’ll be happy if it stays above 100MB. During the switching, all of the house devices reverted to the house WiFi, so for the moment, only my phone and camera were on the extender. A couple pokes at web pages showed the Internet made it there. Since the WiFi controller app showed the extender was connected via Ethernet and wasn’t in the connected WiFi device pool, and my phone was connected to the extender, I called it a solid success of EoP!

This is the first few minutes, so we’ll see how these devices hold up to the garage temperatures and dirt and such.

To consider moving my “data center” to the garage, I do need to re-think the networking. I currently have one of the servers exposed with a public IP address from my static pool. Then the servers are connected together and to the rest of the network with LAN addresses. I could make the garage a data island, and put the EoP device on that public network (which does also have private addresses). Then I could have the extender and EoP inside the garage data center where the servers would keep the temperatures up a little bit, and protected from dirt and random access.

Summer project, at best. Just something to ponder at the most realistic.