OT... but a little networking knowledge desired

[Michael Comperchio]

I manage an organization housed in a hundred year old house built by the
Catholic church to house it's Nun's. It is built like a brick crapper.
Consequently, wireless signal in this place is problematic. The person
before me had some network cabling run, unfortunately, not to every
room, and the connection block is in the basement. So right now I have
the cable modem downstairs, plugged into one of the connections, and the
wireless router upstairs, plugged into the other end of that connection.
This is a so-so solution, because there are areas of the house that get
not signal what-so-ever. The obvious answer is to pay some guy to rewire
the house. Not Going To Happen. Next answer is me rewire the house, also
NGTH. So I though that I would buy a 5 or 8 port switch, attach it to
the cable modem, patch the switch into 5 or 8 of the already run cables,
and attach the wireless to the other end of the most advantageously
exposed spot. But, before I did this, I though I'd ask... can I put a
switch in front of the wireless router? like so:

cable modem ----> switch ---> patch panel ----> wireless router? 

Michael.

PS - I'm planning on getting away with this question by pleading that
every computer in the house is running some version of Ubuntu :)