[plug] home cat5 issues

[Hagar Horrible]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Gavin Chester wrote:
> I have wired the house for cat5 to a six rooms. Installation was
> _relatively_ easy by virtue of doing it underfloor in an old wooden
> house with suspended timber floors. I basically followed a 'modified'
> star topology for my layout. I'll explain 'modified' in a moment ;-). 
> 
> I had all the right gear to do it all myself: rj45 crimp tool,
> connectors, keystone/modular rj45 sockets, punch-down tool, cat5e cable,
> and lan cable tester with passive remote id units for cable identity and
> testing. All sockets and patch cables tested good to cat5 specs. Only
> thing I haven't tested is cable capacitance.
> 
> Since trying to use the setup, I have found issues with woeful speed and
> none of the sockets working well enough to get an IP from the router. At
> this point, I feel sage nodding of heads from the experienced readers,
> with issues such as crosstalk, emf, or dodgy connections springing to
> your mind :-)
> 
> However, I made a test cable to use 'above floor' to replicate my
> underfloor setup and the same issues arise. It seems to centre on the
> keystone/modular sockets. Each leg of my star topology is 'modified' to
> interpose 2-4 keystone sockets along its length. My test cable is like
> this with crimped connectors each end and 30m long. If I connect to the
> crimped connectors at the extreme ends I get good connection, because
> it's just working like a 30m long patch cable. However, if I connect to
> one of the keystone sockets along its length and then a short patch
> cable to PC then it all falls down. A simple diagram of my modified star
> topology may help:
> 
> X-------O---------O------O------X
> 	|			|
> 	|			|	       
> 	PC			Router
> 
> where each 'O' is a keystone socket and 'X' is crimped cable connector
> on a single cat5e cable placed loose on the floor. All connections and
> sockets test as good, but only X-X works, any combination of X-O or O-O
> fails. WHY? Any ideas welcome. BTW: I have used two brand of keystone
> socket, in case that crossed your mind.
> 
> Gavin
> 
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://www.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.linux.org.au

1) Are you using only 1 cable per computer?

2) What was the pin/color combination for each plug?

3) was the cable single core ( for fixed wireing )
or twisted (core for more mobile solutions)?

4) is your router a hub or a switch and what
about the nic in the computers ?

-- 
regs conon
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