OT: cat 5 cable, ethernet, connection jacks

[James Knott]

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.

If I read that correctly, you're planning on running all the computers 
in parallel, which won't work.  Each computer must have it's own 
dedicated cable pairs to the hub.  However, you can run two computers in 
one cat 5 cable, by using the normally unused two pairs, for the second 
computer.  This only works for 10 & 100 Mb ethernet.
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