I am a bit of a geek, and have about sixty-seven trillion networked devices in my house. A lot of them are handhelds that lack wired networking support, but many others have at least 100M ethernet ports.
I have a split-level home, and there's a half-height crawlspace under the main level. It's cool, unfinished, and mostly empty. I decided I'd use that for my networking center. I ran CAT6 stretches from that room out into the house. So far, I've got 9 runs (including the RJ11-capped DSL source for the modem) and will probably add 4-6 more to round things out on the second floor later on.
In my office, I have 3 PCs and a laserjet printer.
In the TV room, I have several consoles, a Nexus Player, a Steam Link, a "smart" BluRay player, and the dock for my Surface Pro 4. The majority of the consoles are last-gen or much earlier, so no wired networking is needed for them. The Nexus Player supports ethernet via USB adapter (daisy-chained through an OTG adapter) and negates the need for networking to the BluRay player. And the Wii U only works with Nintendo's branded, overpriced, impossible-to-find USB-to-Ethernet adapter, so it's on wifi despite my desire to keep it wired.
In the garage, I have an old Dell workstation that's currently fed by wifi serving as a shop computer. I have an utterly ABYSMAL cheapo euro-layout keyboard that came with a PC case years ago, with a sticky right shift key and stupid LED lighting that I don't care about getting all greasy. Nice for looking up pictures when working on unfamiliar cars. That machine will move to ethernet soon, but I'm not in the mood for running that cable at the moment, so it'll wait.
Upstairs, there's a Roku 3 and a pair of Raspberry Pis serving media duties, 3 DSs of varying generations, and a couple laptops. All of this is on Wifi right now, but I'll run ethernet up there in the future. Rokus work much better over wired connections in my experience.
Then, in the crawlspace, I have an old Linksys SGE2000 24-port stackable router, the aforementioned antique Centurylink Router, an old non-AC Netgear wireless AP (I know, I need to get something AC cabable now that the wired side is Gigabit) and two old Dell servers (an R180 with a single hyperthreaded quad-core Xeon, and a 2950 with non-HT dual cores, both with 16 gigs of RAM, and with about 15 TB of SAS drives between them before RAID overhead, and booting ESXi 6.0). Oh, and a really crappy old 13 inch monitor and a random USB keyboard serving KVM duties. I'm trying to get my hands on a cheap old rack KVM to cut down on same cable clutter, but it's not a particularly urgent need.
The switch is set up like this:
A few of the devices on the network are limited by 10/100 NICs (the Nexus Player disappointingly among them), but everything else is working wonderfully at 1 gig. My switch actually has 4 SFP ports if I wanted to get really crazy, but it's only listed as a 10/100/1000 switch, so I'm not sure if it could even utilize any of SFPs extra capacity.
The really depressing part of this is that all of this connects outside through a nominally 50Mb ADSL connection. Nominally, but really more like 30Mb. It's all I can get out here, and I cannot possibly say enough horrible, awful, unkind things about Centurylink to express my true feelings. However, part of the purpose of this arrangement is to circumvent that slow internet connection by housing regularly-used things like ISOs, installers, and media files on a local NAS, so I can grab them rapidly on the network and make new-machine deployment very quick and efficient.
One of the most enjoyable things about running a pair of ESXi servers is that I can play with new and different operating systems without having to fart around with dual-booting on existing workhorse machines. No Grub, no UEFI/Secureboot nonsense. Just deploy a new VM, install the OS, and see what I think. I'm growing fond of BSD and CentOS, especially in lightweight formats.
Here's my office setup:
(Yes, like I said: geek. Also, that Lego supercar in the background? Working 4-speed manual transmission. Cooler than your daily driver.)
And the...er..."rack."
