OK Bag the wireless router idea

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Pablo

Pablo

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Oct 28, 2002
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Everson WA - Pacific NW USA
Can I just hook these two PC's together via their LAN jacks?

What kind of wire, etc?

Will I be able to surf the web with both, etc??

I don't have time to learn this stuff.
 
You can hook them together with a crossover cable, but unless one of them has two network cards, you won't have any place to put your incoming internet cable from the modem.
 
Pablo..

Figure out how many cable-feet to get from the cable modem and first computer and go buy a pre-made Cat5 cable. They have em 100', 75', 50', whatever. Pass the cable through the walls along baseboards, whatever, just rough it in. Plug it into the far computer's Lan port or Ethernet Jack, whatever you're familiar with. Easiest is to go around the outside of the house, but if it's an adjoining room, it's very simple.

If you do this arrangement, your router issues are pretty simple. Any linksys or DLink ethernet-based Cable/DSL router will work. If you use a wireless router that also has ethernet ports, you'll need to turn the wireless broadcasting off so neighbors aren't mooching off your connection or snooping. It's easy..

If you get the stuff together to do it, head for my HomePage on my profile and gimme a call anytime after eight p.m. Eastern time. I have free LD if you don't, I can call you back. I walk folks through this stuff all the time.

Besides, I owe ya one for draggin ya through the muck with the ByPass filter a couple years back, remember?
cheers.gif
 
Alternatively, go to Home Depot, buy some bulk Cat5E by the foot, as much as you need, and then buy two Cat5E jacks (optional: They sell "biscuit" boxes and wallplates to hold these jacks for a nicer-looking installation) and two premade Cat5e cables.

The jacks come with instructions and a tool for inserting the wires into the jack. It is quite easy.

Simply wire one jack according to the TIA568B standard, and the other jack according to the TIA568A standard. The instructions for doing this are included with the jacks. This implements the "crossover" you need to connect two computers back-to-back by swapping the green and orange pairs of wires. The green and orange pairs are used for transmit and recieve and it is necessary to connect transmit to recieve and vice-versa so that is why they must be swapped from end to end. The blue and brown pairs are not used (except for gigabit ethernet, which I doubt you have any need for).


Place the jack near the computer and make the connection between the jack and the computer with the premade cable.

The advantage to this is that it is much easier to route cable without a plug on the end through a house, and you won't have to try finding a real long crossover cable.
 
If you're going to go to all the trouble of running wire, do it right. I may still have buried in my basement somewhere a Siemens two port 10/100 router-firewall that you can have for peanuts. You'll only need one in-wall leg from the router to the second computer.

I agree with Brian that if you're going to run Cat5e, you might as well run it to wall plates. Do it right. Plenum rated cable, while more expensive, pulls much easier and is the proper solid core construction. The materials cost of raw wire and outlets is nothing compared to the effort needed for a quality install. And it's also cheaper than using pre-terminated lengths, which BTW are stranded and don't handle signal as well over longer runs. Nothing stinks as bad as a buggy infrastructure.
 
Pablo, don't do it. Don't start pulling wires - that is so archaic. Get a wireless router - you can get one for very little money or even free - I paid $10 for my wireless router, and have another one that I got for free. I also got my USB wireless adapter for $10 or so.

Look around in your local CompUSA store, Fry's or newegg.com for good deals. Wireless will save you a lot of work and expence vs. pulling wires.
 
"I don't have time to learn this stuff."

Oh...sure.

Plenty of time to manipulate a massive massif out of a hole and across the yard but....

time to learn how to connect a couple PCs.....

Priorities Man!!!!! Priorities!!!!!
 
Yes, and then he has to administer the thing. I don't know the structure of the house (it's Pablo, he's Amsoil, he's rich, so he has a Mondo House!). Repeaters, antennas oiy vey! I agree with Volvo about quality, but lots of folks are ok passing through a little drywall to the next room, but drilling outside walls, plates, wall=caps in the attic, moldings and the rest that you have to do to make it custom (my line of work) is beyond most folks. They sell the premade cables for quick and dirty. For someone not well-versed, it's the way to go.. From 3,500 miles off it was the best I could offer..
dunno.gif
 
Between "archaic" wired 5e gigabit and G wireless (and I've got 'em both running here) I'll take the archaic old wires every single day of the week. The differences in speed, security and data integrity are staggering. Try running multiple high bandwidth video feeds over wireless.

But toocrazy has it right. It takes a little knowledge and skill to install 5e to get the full bandwidth. Bend radius, pull limits, EMI rules, de-twist, tack and tie down standards - they all have to be strictly observed if you want an infrastructure with longevity. You shouldn't even step on the stuff. The pros know this. We pulled a double 5e/RG6QS run to every room (even the garage) in our present house (a 40 yo split level), and my back still aches three years later.

Study up on it, follow the rules, take your time, and you won't regret the effort or expense of a wired infrastructure. In five more years, most home A/V equipment and most major appliances will be networkable.
 
I don't know about plenum being easier to pull, my experience with it (because I got a left-over box of it free from my last job) is that it kinks much easier than riser cable and it is 2x to 3x the cost. It's also much stiffer than riser cable, too.

I ended up pulling some more runs and I used riser cable that time.

I wouldn't bother with plenum unless you're putting it somewhere where building codes require it--and that's nowhere in a single-family dwelling. Riser cable as sold by Home Depot will work fine.

A side note: Plenum cable has CMP printed on the jacket. Riser cable has CMR printed on the jacket. For residential use, CMX (restricted use) cable is ok too, this is sold by Home Depot also and if you're running the cable outside it is UV resistant.

By the way, you can run gigabit ethernet on good quality Cat5 (like Commscope) with no problem. I'm doing it now.

As far as running cable, I don't think Pablo could do a worse job than some of the cable TV contractors I've seen
wink.gif
 
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Volvo,
Quote:

But toocrazy has it right. It takes a little knowledge and skill to install 5e to get the full bandwidth. Bend radius, pull limits, EMI rules, de-twist, tack and tie down standards - they all have to be strictly observed if you want an infrastructure with longevity. You shouldn't even step on the stuff. The pros know this. We pulled a double 5e/RG6QS run to every room (even the garage) in our present house (a 40 yo split level), and my back still aches three years later.

Click to expand...


Well, I didn't even consider all the highly technical implications with any of it. BICCI standards are overkill in homes and even most offices that are outside of a CAD or video-transmission environment. 99.999% of all business and home users are doing their email, low capacity server draws for docs and forms, a little print-sharing and serving and of course, our beloved internet usage. Hardly high demand.

In commercial apps in old buildings where new cabling was NOT an option (and more than a few homes where mahoganny moldings and fancy paint prohibit new cabling), I've run ethernet over 2 pairs of 50 year-old untwisted pitwire a couple of hundred cable-feet to enable ethernet access back to a dsl hub. Works fine. Our internal wiring, especially under BICCI, enables a LOT of capacity we're simply not demanding (yet). Big fat pipe, little bit of flow. I'm mostly out of the commercial area and service the home user these days, but the network infrastructure being installed these days is IMHO, expensive overkill, again, for most people and companies.

And now? Folks are installing big fat Cat6 (10-100 GIG/second transmission rates depending on your muxes)) and single and multi-mode fibre network infrastructure (theoretically unlimited transmission rates) that they'll NEVER use in the life of the lease of the buildings they're moving into. As is usually the case, those advocating this stuff are the folks who sell and PROFIT from it. These crazy, Gold-Plating network guys!

No expense too great!
cheers.gif
 
Very little of that "old" cable is actually untwisted, if it was designed for more than one phone line. (Where I lived in Illinois, it was apparently standard practice by Bell in the 60s/70s to prewire dwellings with 6-pair telephone cable).

On top of that, if you download the IEEE 802.3 specifications and read through them, you'll discover that 10baseT was indeed designed to operate on regular telephone cable (of the type designed for multiple lines--like what was used to hook up a 1a2 key system) AND it was also designed to coexist with regular phone lines in the same cable. The specification specifically addresses the concernt that many people have that Ethernet could pick up interference from a ring signal. It has been designed to be immune to those effects.

The common types of telephone cable that Ethernet cannot run on is silver-satin (not twisted) and that 4-wire "quad" stuff. Incidentally, the 4-wire "quad" stuff was only intended for exposed applications where it would run along a baseboard and the like--Bell standard was to use paired cable for prewires. We went backwards in the 80s in that respect, with many houses built during the 80s prewired with "quad" instead of twisted pair.
 
Supposedly, if the quad is constructed correctly, that is with the wires arranged in a cloverleaf pattern and the cable jacket extruded around them so they do not deviate from that alignment, it will work as well as twisted pair with respect to crosstalk between the two "pairs".

Since the major problem with running 10baseT on improper cable is that false collisions will be detected due to crosstalk, it may work OK on quad that is of the construction I described. A cross section of this cable looks like this. "x" is cable jacket materail, ABCD are conductors:

xCx
AxB
xDx

In such a cable, A and B should be one pair, and C and D should be another.

This is all theoretical, I haven't tried it but I've run across a number of websites that claim this is so...
 
Yeah! I remember that stuff..They used to arrange AppleTalk on a star network that way!!!
cheers.gif


Very speedy! Of course, when all is said and done, the WWW serves up content at a smokin 300 or 400K tops, and hard drives from servers being so slow, we're hardly stressing even 10baseT, or at least, again, 99.999% of us, anyway..
 
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