OT: cat 5 cable, ethernet, connection jacks

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 12:57:00PM -0500, Matt Price wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 12:13:26PM -0500, Matt Price wrote:
> > hey folks,
> > 
> > Hope it's ok if I ask a networking question here... I'm planning to
> > lay a bunch of ethernet cable in a room.  I have these fancy Leviton
> > RJ45 female jacks and am running the cable through wolding, so having
> > many cables come out of a hub is a royal pain.  The computers in the
> > room are arrayed along a straight line.  Is it at all possible to use
> > the RJ45 jack as a simple junction connecting two pieces of cat 5
> > cable?  This would look something like this:
> > 
> > 
> > |hub|--------------|rj45 plug|-----------------|rj45 plug|
> > 		      |				  |
> > 		      |				  |
> > 		      |				  |
> > 		 Computer		       Computer	       
> > 
> > I imagine this is impossible, or people would do it all the time
> > instead of using hubs...  anyway, if someone can explain to me at
> > least why it doesn't work, that'd be a help.
> > 
> > thanks,
> > 
> > matt
> 
> man, you guys are fast.
> 
> but so far I count 3 quite different explanations.  Any comments on
> who's right?

I think the summary is:
You could run two connections on the single wire by splitting it at the
hub and at the first computer, but that you are likely to have a bad
link most of the time due to cross talk noise so it's a bad idea.  The
thing about a bus is completely wrong for twisted pair ethernet.

I wouldn't recomend trying to save on the wire.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml