cat5 splitting??

[nerd4life]

k,

one of the companies i do work for has cat 5 ran all through, and a phone system that runs on the same wires. what i mean is, only one cat5 goes to each office, u plug the cat5 into the phone, then the phone has an output to run a cat5 to the computer.

my question is, can i do something similar at home??

my room is about 60 feet from the closet with the switches, therefore i cant simply uplink one of the switches in my room. i really dont want to run another wire through the attic, even though it cooled down in texas, i bet i would still come close to death up there:)

i have 2 computers in my room. so, does anyone know of a way to "split" the cat5 coming into my room in order to have both computers connected. is there any sort of device i can buy, or some homegrown concoction??

thanx,

tim

[Thelemac]

You could get a hub or a switch...

[nerd4life]

i have two switches sittin in the closet. i tried to uplink one of them in my room, but i guess it is too far, it wont work in here, but works great in there.

o ya, the switches are both little 5 port netgear fs105's.

[Crash893]

i belive you have to have 2 strands of cat v

you can use cat v as a phone line if you put an rj-11 tip on the end

you can use cat v for eithernet ifyou put a rj-45 tip on the end but im pretty sure you cant do both

as for lenth cat-v can only do 300 feet before it fails

this doesnt mean it cant do under some times people have weak nic's or hubs or switches

( i used to do all the cat-v for aol tech data centers)

[su root]

In the old days, they had things called "Inactive Hubs".
They are bascially a Y-splitter, they act like a hub (Layer 1 Multi-Port Repeater) and aren't powered (meaning you can't use it to extend distances). If you can find one, great, but I havn't seen one in years, but if you can find one, it'll be real cheap.

[su root]

Oh, and you wanted to know how they use one cable for both phone and computer?

Phone uses 2 wires
Computer uses 4 wires (1 send, 1 recv, 2 timing)
=6 wires

CAT5 has 8 wires.

(so, you can use 1 CAT5 for 2 computers, but you would have to find out what wires do what, and I wouldn't suggest it, because "Twisted pair" means 4 sets of 2 twisted wires in the cable, and in each pair there is one live wire, and one dead wire (unused). If you put something through the unused wires, you will start to get crosstalk.)

[Thelemac]

Actually, you put all of the data through pairs...one pair for Tx and another pair for Rx. So you *could* split the cable. It would be a royal pain, though.