I like being a sysadmin. In my current job, I’m kind of 1/2 developer, 1/2 sysadmin. Previously I had always been a developer who knew a lot about being a sysadmin. I figured out why I also like being a sysadmin. There’s something about being able to come in and save the day for immediate problems that makes it fun. It’s like being the hero who comes in and saves the day. Being on the front line of problems and fixing things makes me feel useful and important. It doesn’t pay as well or have the strategic impact of being a manager, but it’s satisfying in its own way.

We are back from a one week vacation down in South Carolina. We stayed at a place called Kiawah Island. It’s a resort island with lots of activities for families and golf and tennis enthusiasts. It was a good time. I put up some more pictures of Lucas. He’s growing like crazy. I’ll give a more detailed trip report later.

I have one room with my cable modem, the living room has one desktop/server, and the office has two desktops. I had to run cables from the office and living room into the cable room. Now a normal handy geek would simply run some ethernet cable under the floor or through the ceiling to the cable room. I on the other hand being lazy and inept at that kind of thing simply run them across the floor. This of course is a significant annoyance and tripping hazard. Not good for baby.

So after losing one of my network hubs between two important points last week, I decided it was time to upgrade my network configuration. I had previously tried to bring things together with 802.11g, but I got a lot of connection drops and other various annoyances while I was setting it up. This time I went for Powerline Turbo technology which runs network traffic like ethernet, but over the electrical wiring in your house. This technology has been available for a few years but it hasn’t really caught on the way that wireless has. It comes in the normal Powerline which has a 14Mbps theoretical limit and the Powerline Turbo which has an 85Mbps theoretical limit.

I bought 3 Netgear XE 104 Powerline switches from Amazon for about $80/each and I was hoping for reliability, simple setup and good bandwidth. I was kind of expecting bad bandwidth because every review I saw said that they could get nowhere close to the advertised 85Mbps, the best real world tests came out at 25-30 Mbps, and the average was typically 10Mbps or less. But the amount of bandwidth isn’t that big a deal to me because I don’t do any big file transfers locally.

At least the simple setup part worked as advertised. Because it’s a simple switch, there’s not really any configuration required. I just plugged in my devices and plugged it into the wall and it was all set. It took less than 10 minutes to get it all done(I spent more time waiting for my windows machines to power down so I could free up a power jack to plug in the device). This was much more convenient than having to install new network drivers on every machine for an 802.11g device which was pretty painful last time I tried(but that process has to be better these days).

Reliability so far is fine. No drops or oddities yet.

The bandwidth is not great, I think my local net might be slower than my cable modem now. Between two of my machines I was only getting about 5Mbps-10Mbps, but what was strange was that it was asymmetric. From A->B I’d get 5Mbps, but from B->A I’d get 10Mbps. I’m not sure what’s up with that. I’ll try to test some more later.

So I am sticking with this newfangled Powerline stuff and I give it the following grades:
Reliability: A(tentative rating, jury still out)
Ease of use: A+
Bandwidth: C
Value: B+

It sure beats the setup and reliability problems I had with wireless. It doesn’t have the bandwidth of running real network cable, but for not much money and 5 mins of work I’m happy.