Home networking tips

[Daroy99]

Were going to put a network in our house. I found bulk 1,000ft cable for around $50 for cat5e. My question is, how hard is it to put a network in your self. This is what we were going to do.
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++ > the jack by the router, and we will have 4 cables going to respective rooms. We only have a 3 port router, so only 2 of those would be used at once
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The cables go through the walls, bla bla. How hard is it to crimp the cables and put the ends on it, and do you need a special tool. Any other tips to help?

[sps16]

Its not that hard at all, its quite easy. Just go to radio shack or compusa and buy the cat5 end pieces and a crimping tool. They should know what you will need at compusa, but the people at radioshack don't know their bums from the ground. My advice would be to just get a 4 port router, a linksys. Its a lot easier then to have to pull out a cord and put yours in when you want internet, their pretty cheap now a days and super easy to setup, they practically set themselves up.

[jpdgas]

I agree with the router upgrade, you dont want to constantly switch your cables. home made ones can prove less hardy than manufactured cables. Crimping is easy, just make sure you have the wires in the right order. Its been about a year since i had to make a cable so i dont remember the order, it should be easy to find out though. also strip as little insulation off the main bundle as you can get away with. stay away from radio shack for the tool and jacks if you can help it. they over-charge like mad.

[Lopy-slopy]

I have linksys and it works great. I'm 2 floors above my router right now and my internet is still blazing fast. and it is alot easyer to instal than wires and all that stuff.

[jpdgas]

I am guessing you are talking about a wireless router. Linksys is a company that makes networking equipment, not a form of transmission. Wireless may be prettier than a bunch of wires running around, but it has its drawbacks too. The speeds are not as fast as a wired network due to increased packet loss and people can hijack your signal. The tech is getting better so this isnt as big of an issue anymore. Wireless will also cost you a bit more, especially for 4 pcs. I personally like wires. i trust them more than airwaves, but thats just me. Either is fine for average home users.

[sps16]

yea because with the 4 pc you need a wireless card for each pc which will run up some bucks. They have 54 ghz wireless routers now which are pretty speedy

[MarkM]

Ok I have a question then, I have been attempting to set up a network using the Linksys 4 port router cabled not wireless and although I can get the router to "talk" to the first and second pc I can't get it to "talk" to the internet. I have cloned the mac address and still no go...the help files at Linksys are a rubbish (or I seem to be missing something very basic) the manual is worse than the online help. I did find a help file (made by a user not linksys) but it was to do with configuring the linksys to connect to IRC channels...I hear plenty of people saying that networking is easy (this thread is no different) I need to know what the settings on each section need to be. I am doing this network to learn how it works so I can install my own later on so to make mistakes on someone else's pc's is so much better

[lopxtc]

You may need to cycle the power on the cable modem ... I had a problem that was similar to this also, and drove me nuts for about three days.

Some cable modems cache the MAC address of the machine that first hit it for DHCP and from that point on only allow the card with that MAC address to talk to it. Try the following;

1 -- Unplug it all.
2 -- Cycle the power on the cable modem ... unplug it, and while unplugged hold in the reset button to be sure. Wait about 20-30 seconds to be sure.
3 -- Plug in the cable modem and let it go through its POST sequence.
4 -- Plug the turned off router into the cable modem, after the modem has fully POST'ed and is waiting for a DHCP client.
5 -- Turn on/Plug in the router.
6 -- Wait for the router to do its thing. (similar to steps 3 and 4).
7 -- Plug in and power on the PC's one at a time to test connection.

LMK what this does for you.

Aaron

[MarkM]

Ok I will give it a go and let you know.

[Muzikman]

Also, I have had nothing but problems with LinkSys hardware. I would pull a router out of the box and it would only work for a few minutes before I would just quit (had this happen three different times). So I switched to all Netgear.

As for the original question. You need Male RJ45 ends which is best bought in bulk and you need an RJ45 crimping tool. To be honest, avoid compUSA and RadioShake for these items as you will pay out the nose. The best place I have found oddly enough is HomeDepot. They have everything you need and are pretty cheap. The ends will run anywhere from $5 for 5 to about $15 for 20. The crimping tool will run from about $30 to about $200 (you don't need a good one if you are only doing a few ends).

Lastly is the pinouts of the cable. Here is a link that shows it pretty good. Follow the 568B standard.

http://sean.wenzel.net/docs/cat5/

[MarkM]

Old post but I did say I would report back...
Turned the cable modem off... and still no real go however cloned the mac address again and it was good and then the second machine decided it wouldn't talk properly to the router...turned out it was always doing that The result was after a cable swap still same symtoms so the network card was swapped out and it is perfect...so it turns out that the network card which was a netgear one btw was crap as it didn't have the balls to talk along a 10m cable
After this success with the new netork card I have now installed a network myself with a combined modem and router and the only issues I came up against was the DNS settings needed to be installed to the modem protocols plus the mac address can be found through the c:\ prompt BUT this gives the mac address of the network card !! not the one you need but a little searching through the modem settings I found another Mac address (this was the pc mac address)..installed that and it was all speed ahead...so total of 1 hour from start to finish...not too shabby all things considered...oh and I did need to run the network wizard on both machines but that was totally painless and took all of 5 minutes a machine.

[Fixion]

Its not hard to crip the cables, and yes you need a cable crimper. Order of the wires (for type B, but that doesn't matter) just in case you where wondering (with the pins facing up cable from the back):
Orange-white
Orange
Green-white
Blue
Blue-white
Green
Brown-white
Brown

[Tunaman]

and to solve your port-short router -problem, no need to buy a larger one. A 15 dollar hub will work just fine.

[shartley]

Originally posted by Muzikman
Also, I have had nothing but problems with LinkSys hardware. I would pull a router out of the box and it would only work for a few minutes before I would just quit (had this happen three different times). So I switched to all Netgear.