The homelab has started to sprawl out of the tidy little closet it started in, and I began wondering if I could relocate parts of it to a less visible part of the house. The trouble is, that the ethernet connections all converged at this one tiny closet, and the drywall was all buttoned-up and I had no intention of drilling holes to run new cables.
The angle was somewhat tricky, where I could fish a cable up the wall, but could not get to it from across the ceiling. At the same time, I could get to that same area through the ceiling, but not down the wall.
I was reminded about a trick I saw at a datacenter construction site I’d worked at a while back. At the datacenters, there were multiple giant rooms under which was PVC cable conduit used for connecting different parts of the building. In order to run a cable through the conduit, a pull-string was tied around a plastic bag and stuffed into the PVC pipe. On the other end, a shop vac pulled the plastic bag through the conduit, and with it the pull string behind to pull future cable between parts of the facility. A quite nifty use of tools, in my opinion.
Applied to my basement, I thought I’d be able to get a long piece of sprinkler pipe down the ceiling, and I thought just maybe I could snake a string with a baggie tied to it up the wall, and use the sprinkler pipe like a long extension to the vacuum to suck up the bag with the string attached from the far end of the ceiling.
And so that’s what I did. It took a bit of flopping the pipe around, but eventually there was a very satisfying “thuck” when the bag reached the vacuum and I was able to pull the line through. I then made a loop around a few cables and pulled them through the pipe.
Now that I had cables lying ready for use, I called my ISP and scheduled a relocation of their equipment in the house.
I have to admit that I’ve not moved much gear at this point except for the ISP, which was part of the primary goal. Its been a bit busy around here, and so I expect that this is somewhat of a long haul project, and I might expect to reap the benefits later this year. In any case, I remember the old adage, if you are going to pull one cable, you should pull two. I’m starting to think about fiber in this case also, just to add a little future-proofing. And of course, I left myself the pull-string in the conduit, so I can always come back later.