GoKawiil10Gb/s Ethernet: what I actually did to get it working in my home
Having learned enough about 10Gb/s Ethernet to be comfortable about setting it up in my house, it was time to bite the bullet: order it from the ISP, buy some kit, and get started.
I already had 2.5Gb/s working. The apartment has structured cabling -- each room has one or more RJ45 sockets in the wall, and there's a patch panel downstairs by our front door that has a matching patch socket for each wall socket. So when we moved in, I simply set things up so that there was a 2.5Gb/s switch down by the patch panel, and wired everything together there. Most of our stuff works over WiFi, of course, but I needed a wired backbone to connect the excessive number of computers in my study both to each other, and to the outside world.
What did I need to do?
Simplifying a bit, I had this 2.5Gb/s setup:
The ISP connection came into the apartment in the living room.
It went through a router/firewall machine I'd set up myself (more on that later), then via a 2.5Gb/s switch to the main WiFi AP and also to a wall socket.
Down at the patch panel, I had a 2.5Gb/s switch, which was connected to the patch socket corresponding to the router's wall socket.
Another connection from that switch went to the patch socket corresponding to the wall socket in my study.
In the study, I had another 2.5Gb/s switch that handled internal networking.
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