Greg said:
Home run everything back to the point you want to be your hub. I have mine next
to the PC in my living room, which was a mistake. The whole point of
"structured wiring" is to radiate from a single point that you can use to host
your routers, hubs etc. I ended up with a cludge of stuff next to my PC that
looks like the bridge of the enterprise. It should really be in my wiring
closet. (or so my wife says)
It is what happens when you start wiring without a plan.
If you do have multiple uses in a certain spot, you can drop a hub in there.
Cat 5e can even support more than one LAN in the cable but that is unsupported
officially. What is verboten in a business environment is running the phone
along with the LAN in a single cable. Ring spikes will spike your data. I doubt
you will notice in your home (error recovery will deal with it) but you are
still dealing with 100v or so when the phone rings.
There are a lot of "throughput" issues that are significant with 20 users
banging a LAN but will probably never show up at home.
I assume you are wiring for Ethernet 10/100 networking?
Logically this is a bus (pure collision) but physically there needs to be a hub
or router at every termination of a cable to connect send and recieve data.
With 2 machines you can use a twisted cable but at 3 that won't work. Think
RS232 send/rec data and the null modem idea.
I have some "bullet points" from my IBM connnectivity classes about hubs,
routers, gateways and bridges if you want them. I will have to scan them into
PDFs
Basically a hub just connects all the cables together and gets the send/recieve
going the right way.
A router connects 2 same type LANs together like the WAN from the cable modem
to your LAN and provides some simple firewalling
A bridge connects different types of lan together (Token Ring to Ethernet for
example) although they can be the same type. You can have firewalling there
too.
A gateway gets you into entirely different architectures. Mainframe CICS to
LAN, for example.
Thanks again - nice description!
You have it right - it's ethernet 10/100 with
2 PC's permanently wired to a Linksys router in
room 1. Periodically I connect my third - a
thinkpad - to the router, leaving 1 port available.
I wanted to connect the 4th PC, which "lives"
downstairs in room 4, via wireless to avoid crawling
around in the attic to install cat5. It connects with
the new wireless router plugged into the last port
on the Linksys, but it is very low signal strength
and gets knocked off
My new plan is to wire a single rj45 in room2, permanently
attached to the last available port on the Linksys. Then
I'll plug the new wireless router into that hub - the new PC
is in the room directly below. I already tested that with
a long cat5 jumper cable, and it connects reliably with max
signal strength. The wireless easily works in rooms 2, 3, & 4
when it is installed in room2.