I Spent Eight Hours on My Home Network. I'm Still Not Done.
security-operations personal lessons-learned
This past weekend I started rebuilding my home network. Started. I am not done.
When we built our house 2.5 years ago, we had it pre-wired with Cat6. Smart move. The problem: the person who knew where every cable ran wasn’t the one who did the install (that’s a story for another day). We went with a big box store instead.
They connected what we paid for and left. That’s it. That’s the whole story.
What they left behind was a pile of 30-plus cables, many unterminated, some terminated but not connected to anything, unlabeled, lying in a heap. No map. No key. No documentation of any kind. Just a tangle of Cat6, some Cat5 (why???), coax, and speaker wire in assorted sizes, left for some future version of me to deal with.
That future version of me showed up last weekend.
What I Found
Eight hours in, I have a better idea of what’s what. Not a complete picture. A better idea.
Two runs have keystone jacks. Looks finished. Looks intentional. Neither one tones out on the other side, two floors below. I don’t know what they connect to. I don’t know if they connect to anything. Someone installed a jack on both ends of a mystery.
My hand-written labels kept sliding off, which I found completely unacceptable, so I’ve ordered a proper label maker. It will arrive this week. The project will continue.
Sound familiar?
The Part Where This Becomes a Security Post
You knew it was coming.
Two keystone jacks. Properly installed. Labeled. Looks like finished work. Neither one goes anywhere. Two floors of cable, terminated on both ends, connecting nothing to nothing.
That’s not a wiring problem. That’s security theater with a patch cable.
I walk into this constantly. A client has a firewall. It’s configured. Rules exist. Nobody has tested whether those rules actually do what they think they do. The work looked done. For two years, it was “fine.” Then something happened and everyone discovered that “fine” was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The install isn’t the hard part. Verifying that it works is the hard part. And that’s the step that gets skipped every single time, because it’s slower, less satisfying, and you can’t bill for it the same way you can bill for running cable.
So you get jacks that go nowhere and nobody notices until someone like me shows up with a toner and a bad attitude.
The Tax You Pay
Every undocumented system has a reckoning. Sometimes it’s a weekend project that turns into a multi-week ordeal with a label maker on the way. Sometimes it’s a 2 a.m. call when something goes down and nobody knows what connects to what.
The cost isn’t just the time. It’s the confidence you don’t have when you need it most.
Document your environment. Label your cables. Write down why things are set up the way they are. Not for the auditors. For yourself, at 2 a.m., six months from now.
My network is going to be beautiful when this is over.
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