Does having multiple RJ45 jacks degrade the Internet signal a lot?

[clare]

If and when the "puppy attack" happens you cut the damaged cable and install a jack. Always leave some extra cable in the wall or wherever so you have something to work with.

[Char Jackson]

Yes, it's that simple. That's exactly how I've done it myself.

It's not dead once you connect devices to each end of it.

[clare]

Being in the business, I have had more D-Link consumer equipment failures than any other brand. Their commercial grade stuff is so-so. The only one's I've used have failed within 5 years. I'm currently using an Airlink NIMO router in the basement of my 2 storey house and the signal is useable throught the whole house and 15 feet behind the house on the patio as well.

[Char Jackson]

That doesn't make sense. Why would a single port router lead to address conflicts?

If the DSL modem already includes a router, why are people adding a second router? I know there are some edge cases, but I'm wondering about the majority.

[miso]

I'm just running the switches in rooms (short cables), but a friend has them going through the house, much like what the OP wants. I don't know if he ever checked them for speed.

I might just get a Dlink router and chalk the Linksys box (not a cheap one) up to experience. The one time I needed support from D-Link, it was excellent. I can't say my experience with Linksys is the same.

I fired up some Dlink WAPs about two years ago. Old B stuff I no longer used, but wanted to do a quick bridge. They still worked. I've had Netgear stuff fail under two years. Twice. However, they may not suck anymore. Or maybe I got junk. People complain about Netgear power supplies, but mine were fine. I saved the wall warts and trashed the rest.

Netgear used to have a different name. It was a product of a merger IIRC>

Ah yes, Bay Networks.

According to wiki (which of course doesn't mean much), Netgear is outsourced and D-Link is not. I don't get too bent out of shape regarding OEMs, but I ODM-ing is another story. Support on ODM gear tends to be poor. When you use ODMs, then you are just shipping black boxes.

I'm just appalled at the crappy service I got from Linksys on a box close to $200.

[Chuck Banshee]

Here, to help, are 6 pictures uploaded to simplify descriptions:

1. WISP antenna currently jury rigged with patch cords & extension cables:
2. So-called "bucket router" temporarily being used to bring signal into the house wirelessly from outside:
3. Crawl space view up into the floor of the office (center of house):
4. Crawl space view over to the game room (far end of house):
5. Entry point at the office (where the office jack will be placed): www1.picturepush.com/photo/a/7212874/1024/Anonymous/cat5-questions.gif
6. Entry point of the game room (where the game room jack will be placed):

[Jeff Liebermann]

Nope. There were no *PASSIVE* ethernet hubs. Passive means that there's no powered electronics inside. You can combine (mix) data on a token passing network, such are Arcnet, but not with ethernet. You could consider 10base5 or 10base2 to be some manner of distributed passive hub, but that's not common terminology.

If it's in print, it's obsolete.

Correct. A hub is also called a multiport repeater (especially in IEEE documents, which drive me nuts).

Detail:

1. A two port ethernet switch is called a bridge.
2. All 802.11 wireless is bridging. While there may be layer 3 IP configuration for the router section, the actual wireless traffic is bridging.
4. >It?s anyone?s guess that how efficiently it will

I haven't seen many large hubs for perhaps 15 years. Compex TX3264U

64 port hub is one. Cisco had a large hubs, but I can't find the number. They not common.

What limits the speed of the hub is that it can go no faster than the rated wire speed of a single port. For example, if I had a 100baseT hub, and was running a network backup between two ports, there would be zero bandwidth available to the other ports. Needless to say, hubs don't scale very well and are easily maxed out.

Ethernet switches don't have that problem. There are two basic types, bus and crossbar. The bus type bandwidth is limited by the bandwidth of the internal backplane. 2GHz is typical. You can transfer data between any two ports at wire speed. You can also have independent (non-blocking) transfers between two other ports, up until the available bus bandwidth is exhausted. For example, a 100baseT switch, with a 2GHz bus, can use up to: 2000 / 100 = 20 pairs of ports. That limits this particular switch to 40 ports before it runs out of bus bandwidth. The crossbar switch is simply a cross point switch between any two ports. This becomes unwieldy with a large number of ports, because every time you double the number of ports, you need 4 times the number of cross points. It is cheap and effective up to about 32 ports. Of course, there are hybrids between the two types.

That's called collision domains.

Not quite. Switches pass broadcast packets to all ports. This is one of the big headaches with large wireless LANs, which can easily (and quite often) end up belching nothing but broadcasts (ARP requests etc). I've sniffed a (now defunct) muni wi-fi system that was doing that. Little wonder users found it slow and useless.

What ethernet switches will NOT pass are collisions, corrupted packets, malformed packets, garbage, jabber, and noise. Not passing collisions is why it's called a collision domain.

Discarding packets is something that an ethernet card, in a PC, does quite easily and neatly. The card just looks at the header and determines if the destination is the local device. If not, it just drops the packet. This is all done in hardware on the ethernet card and does not involve the CPU. The time wasted by dropping packets cannot be recovered, which will certainly have an impact on speed, but it will not slow down the computah.

Yep.

Sorta. Many managed ethernet switches (i.e. Cisco) allow some ports to be configured as a hub. These are intended for monitoring traffic on other ports. Since the monitor port will not be used for any incoming traffic, there's no slow down caused by it monopolizing the switch bus bandwidth. It's very handy for network management, traffic monitoring, diagnostics, snooping, and playing around. Otherwise, hubs are a bad nightmare that are thankfully obsolete. A clue is that you can't buy a brand new ethernet hub anywhere.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Been there. Use a recessed wall plate:

I dunno about this one:

Yep. It didn't take me much to work out the problem and magic formula. Convincing the customer is much more difficult.

I've never heard that one.

I've had an electrician tell me that the right way to wire a house is to put run 4 wires instead of 3 to each wall outlet, and set them up so that each of the two outlets goes to a seperate breaker, and possibly a seperate phase. It's also handy for wiring 220VAC in the same outlet. The extra wire can also be used for wiring 3 way switches. Probably a good idea, but nobody is doing it.

These daze, home alarms are either carrier current on the AC power wires, or wireless.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Well, this is messy, but I think you might appreciate the details. I'll use the common Speedstream 4200 DSL modem as an example. When installed in the approved AT&T manner, the ethernet port delivers

192.168.1.64 to the external router. The management IP address of the DSL modem is 192.168.1.1.

When connected to a typical Linksys router, the router also wants to use 192.168.1.1 as it's IP address. That's not going to work, and the DSL modem automagically switches to 192.168.0.1 and delivers

192.168.0.64. (This is not 100% reliable, causes some odd problems, and is largely responsible for why Belkin and others are delivering routers using 192.168.2.1).

At first glance, this arrangement looks like double NAT. It is, but with a difference. All IP ports in the DSL modem are forwarded to the ethernet port, so there's no problem with incoming traffic not making it to the router. Were this a "real" double NAT setup, the first router (in the DSL modem) would NOT have any ports forwarded by default.

The catch is that you can only forward ALL the IP ports to one IP address. That means that the DSL modem can only do the NAT thing to one IP address, and therefore to only one device. If that device is a router, there's no problem. If you try to connect an ethernet switch to the DSL modem, and plug in multiple computahs, only one computah will work.

There's one other item that might be of interest. The DSL modem intercepts all traffic on the WAN (DSL) side destined to the management IP address (192.168.1.1). Normally, the external router is configured to send everything to the internet, except the IP's on the LAN side (192.168.1.xxx). If you plug 192.168.1.1 into the web browser, the router will send it to the internet, and the DSL modem will not respond. So, they violate some RFC, and trap this address, sending it to the local LAN side, and then to the management web server inside the modem.

The problem is that the 4200 seems to have a botched implementation of this undocumented feature. The later DSL modems work well, as do most cable modems. Older modems lack this feature and require a static route on the WAN side to get to the DSL modem management web page.

[Jeff Liebermann]

I have the scars to prove it.

Sigh. Like I said, there are no simple installs.

Looks ok to me. Nothing much to complain about here. Well, don't forget to use anti-seize grease on the threaded pipe mast.

Looks like someone built up the wall with battens, wallboard, and floor tiles glued to the wallboard. What are the wall tiles made from? I think I can see why the stud finder didn't work. The studs are too far away.

[Chuck Banshee]

I understand and agree.

Home Depot didn't have anything between 100 feet (which was too short) and 500 feet (which is probably three times what I need).

Here's a picture of the box of cable that I bought:

- $75 cat5e 24AWG solid core indoor/outdoor "tan"

-

Here are 6 pictures of the current (abomination) setup:

[Chuck Banshee]

Where do most of you buy about 250 feet of cat5e cable? ( Here is a picture of what I bought for $75 + San Jose tax)

Yes. But.

My new WISP is asking me to put the first device (UBNT M2) in 'bridge' mode so that it would be on my WISP provider's subnet (Santa Cruz Mountains).

My portable Skype phone works - but sometimes on outgoing calls (which is the only way I use it) it only hears one end of the conversation. Could 'that' be related to the double NAT?

and leave the NAT to the WRT54G.

I understand the suggestion. In effect, I think both the NAT & the DHCP will be removed when/if I follow my WISP's recent (yesterday) suggestion to configure the Ubuntu Bullet M2 in "bridge" mode and change the IP address to be on his subnet.

One reason I may have to add "a" pigtail is that the planar antenna N connector is in the CENTERLINE of the antenna (which seems to me to be the dumbest place to be!).

The problem with the centerline is that the mast is in that same centerline! So, you can't have any mast ABOVE the antenna.

Here is a picture I took tonight of what I mean:

You can see the bullet-shaped white Ubiquiti M2 screwed directly into the back of the 19 dBi planar antenna, tilted slightly upward.

In the future, if I want to add a TV antenna, I'd have to move the bullet M2 out of the centerline anyway. So, at that point, I'll need "a" patch cord anyway.

Your discussion on the signal losses in that pigtail are interesting!

This is a picture of what I bought from "Home Despot" for $75 + tax:

Does it look OK for the 3 runs below? a) About 100 feet from the antenna to the garage (zig zagging outdoors & buried just underground) ... and then continuous to ... b) About 25 feet from the garage to the crawl space up to the office (zig zagging all indoors) c) About 25 separate feet from the office back down to the crawl space and horizontally over to the game room

That makes sense because that was the "right way(tm)" to wire the game room; if I were to wire the garage, then it makes sense to be similar to the game room in concept (i.e., a 'dead wire' run from the office to the garage).

I have no problem running two cables - so - I won't consider doubling up anymore. I have three times more cat5e cable than I need anyway. And, these pictures of the crawl space show I have plenty of room.

I just need to drill a bigger hole! :)

Picture of crawl space view up into the floor of the office

of entrance hole in the wall of the office: www1.picturepush.com/photo/a/7212874/1024/Anonymous/cat5-questions.gif

Picture of crawl space view over to the game room (far end of house):

of hole in the wall of the game room:

[Chuck Banshee]

Oh oh ...

I had already bought this tester at the same time as the cable (but I can return it as I haven't opened it yet): $80 + tax at Home Depot Klein Tools "VDV Scout Pro Tester Kit, VDV501-809

But, I like the price of your $15 tester MUCH BETTER!

[miso]

That would sure be a lot of breakers.

I vaguely remember (which makes it likely I'm wrong) that there is an issue regarding running different phases in the same box unless it really is 220.

You've probably seen large homes where they use multiple breaker boxes. I assuming there is a price point where the second box saves enough wire that it is worth the effort.

[miso]

Is this the Airlink 101 stuff that Fry's practically gives away?

[miso]

My head is about to explode like that episode on Star Trek with Harry Mud. Norman coordinate. Or maybe Nomad being confused about Kirk being the creator.

I don't install enough wired system to be good at it. I get it working, lose all knowledge, then relearn everything when someone begs me to hook up a router.

I have the modem address at 192.168.1.254. The router is at

192.168.123.1. Hell if I recall why I had to set them up as totally different networks, other than I had conflict otherwise. The modem is an 2wire used commonly on AT&T bought off of Craigslist. My ISP sold me some POS that would lock up. [Asking for a new modem got me a new POS that was worse than the first, plus a year's lock in.] Say what you want about 2wire gear, it never locks up for me. It also detected the double NAT, bitched at me, turned off it's firewall and DMZed to my router. I was both dissed and pleased at the same time. The thought of having to make it all work again is what I suppose keeps me from replacing the flaky Linksys router.

[Chuck Banshee]

Taking all the advice into account (much appreciated!) ...

How does this proposed diagram look?

Understood.

Given the diagram referenced above, how do these numbers look?

- WISP provider antenna is on the next ridge, 2000 feet line of sight away

- WISP requests I set the radio to bridge mode (Santa Cruz Mountains)

- WISP asks me to set it to a given 10.0.x.y IP address

- WISP asks me to set broadband router IP (WRT54G) to 10.0.x.y+1

- I don't really understand WISP provider's suggestions - but will comply

- Cable is 500' of cat5e 4pr 24AWG Solid Tan CMR CMX Outdoor RoHS

- Antenna is 19 dBi planar with N female connector

- Radio is Ubiquiti Bullet M2 with N male connector (mounted on antenna!)

- Antenna is 13 feet off the ground on a steel pole set in concrete

- Cat5e cable is ~100 foot run (to be buried) from radio to garage

- Angled & tubed hole is planned; drip loop on outside is planned

- Extra coil of cable on inside garage wall is planned

- 15 volt Ubiquiti POE is planned to be mounted in the garage

- From garage, cat5e cable enters crawl space & up to office (~25 feet)

- Wall plate definitely on office wall (probably 3 jacks will be used)

- Jumper from wall plate to the Linksys WRT54G router input port

- Output from WRT54G goes back to another jack in the wall plate

- That jack is wired ~25 feet back down the crawl space to the game room

- At the game room, is another wall jack

- A jumper tethers the wall jack to the Wii gaming console

- Optionally, the garage is similarly tied to the third jack in the office

See proposed diagram here:

[Chuck Banshee]

Since I added more pictures to answer questions, here's the set:

Diagram of proposed setup (based on everyone's advice!)

• WISP antenna pointed at the next ridge about 2000 feet away:

• Temporary "bucket router" to bring signal into house wirelessly:

• Crawl space view up into the floor of the office (center of house):

• Crawl space view over to the game room (far end of house):

• Entry point at the office (where the office jack will be placed):

• www1.picturepush.com/photo/a/7212874/1024/Anonymous/cat5-questions.gif

Entry point of the game room with box of cable proposed:

• Klein Tools cable tester bought from Home Depot (unopened as yet):

[Chuck Banshee]

That's a GREAT idea!

I assembled the mast with water pipe so that I could disassemble it at will; but I hadn't thought about the gray anti-seize paste idea!

You are right that it's definitely floor tile (which feels like a stone of some sort) that is on top of an existing wall!

I think it's a remodel where they had left-over floor tiles so they put it on the wall (for some whacko reason).

The wall-within-a-wall actually isn't a problem since I'll just drill through the inside wall (I have a six-foot long drill bit!) to easily get to the crawl space behind it - but it 'was' a surprise to see a second wall a two-by-four's width inside of the outside wall.

Here is another picture:

[Chuck Banshee]

Thanks for all the advice!

Previously, I posted the wrong URL to the Klein tools so here's the correction with the photos:

1. Diagram of proposed setup (based on everyone's advice!)
2. WISP antenna pointed at the next ridge about 2000 feet away:
3. Temporary "bucket router" to bring signal into house wirelessly:
4. Crawl space view up into the floor of the office (center of house):
5. Crawl space view over to the game room (far end of house):
6. Entry point at the office (where the office jack will be placed):
7. Entry point of the game room with box of cable proposed:
8. Klein Tools cable tester bought from Home Depot (unopened as yet): At this point, my WISP provider is asking me to set the radio in "bridge" mode with a certain 10.x.y.z IP address and then to set my broadband router to +1 that IP address.

So, that's my next step. If that works (it didn't when I tried it earlier), then I will begin the permanent wiring (based on all your wonderful inputs).

This is a great team - special thanks to the key posters on alt.internet.wireless (Jeff, miso, clare, Char, Charlie, Stephen, krw, et al) and alt.home.repair (trader4, Oren, willshak, et al).

You guys make the USENET work in ways the web can't compete with!