The lack of tools and materials at this particular stage of the actual project has prompted me to get on with a side project which is still kind of related and should sate the appetite of those hungry for pictures.
I need to get data down to the workshop. I have various subnets in the house which might be useful, so I am running a fibre link. I have gone for fibre because of it's immunity to noise from the mains cable which runs in parallel to it for quite some distance. Also, my current equipment supports mini-GBIC's.
The project right now is to get a new router going. My current router is absolutely fantastic. It's a Nokia IP330 gateway hacked to run pfSense (BSD based router application). It's been running for almost 5 years now and has never crashed, ever. Unfortunately, it's 450MHz AMD K6 cannot cope with the steadily increasing bandwidth. It can route traffic at about 35Mb/s, but the ISP is now supplying 100Mb/s downstream, so it has to be upgraded.
Here I am building another pfSense box on an old (2004) Dell PowerEdge 750 1U server with a 2.8GHz P4 CPU and an eye watering 1GB of memory, more than enough horsepower. Also the hardware in the Dell supports actual vLAN's. I am also configuring the switch with all the correct vLANs to pass down the fibre trunk link between the data cabinet in the house down to the workshop.
I apologise that it's only loosely related to the overall project, but it's what I'm up to at the moment.