If the new house does need rewiring, I’m thinking about having an ethernet backbone put in with sockets in every room. This quite elaborate fantasy now extends to having a Media PC connected to the telly and a SAMBA fileserver in the attic, with all my large storage in one place (getting on, now, for over a terabyte spread over 5 different machines, if you also count Paul’s.) Unfortunately, money is going to be quite tight over the first few months of the mortgage, so this is probably pipe-dream.
Latest new hard drive hasn’t been an unmitigated success. After a few days of working fine, suddenly the machine seized up and wouldn’t work properly until I took it back out. Still, at least I’ve moved some of the files around and there’s less pressure on the existing hard drives now. Maybe I should get around to fixing the drives in the machines properly rather than just letting them float around at strange angles.