I just finished pulling network cable through the house from the bedroom, office and living room into the basement where the server farm will live. With any luck, all the runs will be good enough for gigabit.

I also had to install a new phone jack in the basement, because, oddly enough, nobody thought to put a phone down there before. Eventually, it will be the only jack hooked up to the Verizon loop once I get the VoIP service setup running, but for now I just twisted the new line onto the big wads of wires that are bypassing the nice 66 punch-down block next to the electrical panel. Everything was all nasty and corroded, so I figured I'd have to go back and fix it later.

After I finished installing cable, I plugged a phone into the new jack to see if I had wired it to the right pair. Even with a DSL filter, the dialtone sounded pretty noisy, but I tried plugging the DSL modem into it anyway. Synced right up. Huh. So I hooked up the server and booted. PPPoE came up. Pings worked; even flood pings only lost a few packets. Download speeds were around 180 KB/sec, right where they should be. Who'd have thought that a line too sketchy for analog voice would work fine with 1.5 Mbit DSL?