Steve Litt wrote: > I have an additional question. I have a 150' cat5 cable hand made by my > vendor. It doesn't work. A friend told me that with long runs there's a > special wiring method than with short runs, in order to limit capacitance or > inductance or some such.
it's hooey. 4 pair 100Mbps ethernet over cat5 is spec'ed to a bit over 100m. There's only one way to wire it up. You can buy tester boxes which look like a pair of phone handsets clipped together - you put one at each end of the line and it tests for electrical continuity for all 4 pairs (and tells you if the polarity is wrong etc). They were about $80 a few years ago. This test doesn't tell you whether they will work at 10Mbps or 100Mbps. There's expensive testers for this, but plugging the cable into two computers with NICs that are known to work does the test at no charge (do a ping). All cables I've had that passed the DC continuity test also carried the 100Mbps packets as well. I have several 100m cables that work just fine (no lost packets), so presumably 100Mbps can go further than the spec on cat5. For distances further than 100m, I use a hub/switch/something to reform the packets and send them on their way again. Joe -- Joseph Mack PhD, High Performance Computing & Scientific Visualization LMIT, Supporting the EPA Research Triangle Park, NC 919-541-0007 Federal Contact - John B. Smith 919-541-1087 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
