[mythtv-users] 'powerline' ethernet experience?

Francesco Peeters francesco at fampeeters.com
Fri Dec 4 07:17:56 UTC 2009


Fedor Pikus wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Nick Rout <nick.rout at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Anyone got any gems for me? I have difficulty running cat5/6 and
>> wireless is giving me grief. Powerline ethernet (the 200Mbps version)
>> is looking attractive.
>>
>> Any experiences, gotchas etc? The system is promoted as being ideal
>> for video streaming so I am hoping it will be OK. I realise real life
>> won't be 200Mbps, but that shouldn't matter as long as it is within a
>> reasonable percentage of that.
>>
>> Is there a performance degradation if I want to run two clients via
>> powerline? Iy'll be:
>>
>> backend<-cat6->switch<-cat6->powerline adaptor<-powerline ethernet->two clients
>>
>>     
> Funny you should ask. I just bought Netgear powerline kit (200AV
> version). The damn things can't find each other even after being
> plugged into adjacent outlets. I guess I'm going back to wireless.
>
>   
Did you install the windows only software to administer them and give
them the same encryption key, etc?

I have 2 units (85Mbps), one in the house, the other one in the shed,
where a NAS is located which I use for my daily backups. They didn't see
eachother either, until I started the VM with WinXP and ran the software
on them.

They are now about 50 copper-meters (15 real meters) and 2 circuit
breakers apart, and work fine... I get about 50-60 Mbps out of them,
which is fine for my application. I made the initial full backup to the
NAS with the unit on the GigE wired network, before moving it to the
shed, where it now has been living since a few months.

As I use "cp -a -l" (to create hardlinked copies of the previous day's
backup each day on the NAS) and rsync for my backups, all backups are
full backups, but the effective backup action is that of incremental
backups. As a result it's not that much data on a daily basis, which
works out just fine over the ~50Mbps link between server and NAS!

So I guess, as always, that YMWV, and the amount of noise on your
powerline will have a big influence too! (My local wiring is separated
from the grid with a special HF powerline filter to keep my X10 signals
in and noise out... I assume that also helps the PowerLine Ethernet
signal...

--FP


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