[plug] Home Network (Cabling) Problems

[Mark Nold]

Hi guys,

Since i know a few of you have home networks, I was hoping someone may be able
to give me a few pointers. Sorry for the length but i thought i'd be thorough.)


I have 8 Cat-5 cables in the walls of my house to two different outlets (with
4 sockets each). Then in the roof i have a hub. (Which i have tested every port
on and is OK)

Since i am not using a rack and there is only an even number of cable segments
between each PC and the Hub i have reversed the wiring of the cables in the
walls so that i can plug them directly into the hub.

In Room No.1 everything works fine. I can plug 2 PC's in and they can talk to
each other on any of the sockets in the outlet. 

Unfortunatly in Room No.2 when i plug in my laptop it can't talk to the PC in
Room No.1 with the (tested and proven) cabling on any of the sockets in the
outlet.

I am using PING to test the connection with the same two PC's every time.

The cable are from the same original length (i bought a big length and chopped
it up), and the wall sockets and plugs are all from the same box.


The differences between Room No.2 and No.1 are:

1. Room No.2 cables run right next to 3 coax cables. 1 for TV antena and 2 for
Cable (The "Cable TV" cables are not used at present)

2. The Cat-5 cables from Room No.2 are much longer than from Room No.1 they
are about 13 meters long each.

3. The wall socket in Room No.2 comes out just behind my TV + AMP + Stereo stack.


4. The cables from Room No.2 run through my roof but instead of a large (1.5
meter) crawl space there is only a 30cm crawl space and a tin roof. (Which was
a real bitch to lift and put back in place)



My questions are:
1. Any obvious problems with my setup? I didnt think the coax should cause interferance...
but would it? Is the cabling lenght too long? etc

2. Any ideas / suggestions for how to find out what the problem is? Any equipment
i could rent / borrow to test things? (I have a little Ohm Meter thing.... but
unfortunatly its only got tetsing wires that stretch 50cm)

3. Any ideas? 


Thanks alot.

mn


Mark Nold
markn at enspace.com