[ILUG] [OT] Networking...

[Christian van den Bosch]

Niall O Broin wrote:
> Somebody posted a link earlier - they were 7.50 each (don't recall currency)
> which is 15.00 for a run. Out there in the real world where you're paying for
> people's time, that's not dear. And that includes the sockets. If you split an
> existing pair by hand, you need a new socket at each end (or a REALLY nasty Y
> drop cable) 

Fair enough, I hadn't seen them that cheap, or anywhere near it.

> Oh sorry - you mentioned Y cables - yuck.

:)

> And for real fun, have a POE source at one end of a run, and a splitter and
> two NICs at the other. But don't try that at home if you suffer from an
> allergy to magic blue smoke.

Actually, a PoE supply should (in theory) only damage the terminating
resistors, which will only release a tiny bit of smoke - the positive
and negative rails will each feed into a separate coil on the ethernet
line transformer. However I'll grant you there are far more productive
ways to wire one's cat 5 runs :)

That said, I was dismayed to see someone wiring up new offices recently
with one cat 5 run to each pair of network jacks... he certainly won't
be using gigabit any time soon!

Splitting a cat 5 run into two ethernet runs should really only be used
as a last resort on existing runs. Anyone who runs half as much cable as
they should, just because they can split it, needs shooting.

And no, it doesn't take *any* extra effort to run two pairs instead of
one; you use two boxes of cat 5, and pull them together.

cjb

http://ocean.ucc.ie/~cjvdb1/