I finally bit the bullet and pulled an Ethernet cable from the living room to the office. It was a bit of a nightmare trying to find a way to do this discreetly given the fact the house is over 200 years old, but it’s done and I have the scars to prove it.
Previously, I’d been depending on wifi to to link the different network sections. But between the fact that the neighborhood is saturated and that wireless networks can have hiccups we will see micro drops was causing little problems here and there, especially with NFS mounts that depend on DNS reverse lookups to authorize computer access.
So here’s the updated network diagram of the house.
Everything is so much more stable now, and the performance for file transfers between the office in the living room is much better. Backup replication between the Solaris boxes is faster and more stable (starting to see the processor as the congestion point with ssh as the transport), fewer dropouts on Airplay etc.