10Gb/s Ethernet: what I actually did to get it working in my home

Having learned enough about 10Gb/s Ethernet to be comfortable about setting it up in my house, it was time to bite the bullet: order it from the ISP, buy some kit, and get started. I already had 2.5Gb/s working. The apartment has structured cabling -- each room has one or more RJ45 sockets in the wall, and there's a patch panel downstairs by our front door that has a matching patch socket for each wall socket. So when we moved in, I simply set things up so that there was a 2.5Gb/s switch down by the patch panel, and wired everything together there. Most of our stuff works over WiFi, of course, but I needed a wired backbone to connect the excessive number of computers in my study both to each other, and to the outside world. What did I need to do? Simplifying a bit, I had this 2.5Gb/s setup: The ISP connection came into the apartment in the living room. It went through a router/firewall machine I'd set up myself (more on that later), then via a 2.5Gb/s switch to the main WiFi AP and…