SeanTater
May 10th, 2010, 02:32 PM
I'm not thinking this directly relates to Ubuntu so I posted this in the Café..
It's a question about wiring cat5e/twisted pair and setting up a network in an extremely
confined space.
My house was wired with cat5e network cable, but the blue/blue-white wire pair was used for telephone and the rest were bundled in the junction box outside. Since I recently got my networking certification and I had to read on the wiring and connections, etc. I realized that only two pairs out of the four were necessary for 10/100 Ethernet. This means that I could connect 10/100 Ethernet and leave the telephone untouched. So I connected two wire pairs from two cables to make a crossover cable: green to orange and green-white to orange-white. I don't think it matters whether I used crossover or straight-through though, from what I've heard most NICs and switches will detect it and resolve the issue. Anyway - it works, and it's very speedy. (I went from 30-50KB/s using 802.11g, which is very congested here, to ~11 MB/s using 100mbps Ethernet.)
So - that's the summary.. But here's the question:
What if I wanted to connect more than two computers via that cable box? There isn't room for a hub or switch, (there's barely room for the wires). Is it possible I could create a half-duplex network of three or more switches/computers by some connection arrangement (maybe all similar colors, like all green-stripes together, same for green, orange, and orange-stripe) or is it a lost cause?
Thanks in advance for the help! (Even if it's just to tell me I'm nuts!)
It's a question about wiring cat5e/twisted pair and setting up a network in an extremely
confined space.
My house was wired with cat5e network cable, but the blue/blue-white wire pair was used for telephone and the rest were bundled in the junction box outside. Since I recently got my networking certification and I had to read on the wiring and connections, etc. I realized that only two pairs out of the four were necessary for 10/100 Ethernet. This means that I could connect 10/100 Ethernet and leave the telephone untouched. So I connected two wire pairs from two cables to make a crossover cable: green to orange and green-white to orange-white. I don't think it matters whether I used crossover or straight-through though, from what I've heard most NICs and switches will detect it and resolve the issue. Anyway - it works, and it's very speedy. (I went from 30-50KB/s using 802.11g, which is very congested here, to ~11 MB/s using 100mbps Ethernet.)
So - that's the summary.. But here's the question:
What if I wanted to connect more than two computers via that cable box? There isn't room for a hub or switch, (there's barely room for the wires). Is it possible I could create a half-duplex network of three or more switches/computers by some connection arrangement (maybe all similar colors, like all green-stripes together, same for green, orange, and orange-stripe) or is it a lost cause?
Thanks in advance for the help! (Even if it's just to tell me I'm nuts!)