I will soon be moving back into my parents house, and bringing my computer and cable internet connection with me. I want to know if it’s feasible to network my parent’s computers with mine (specifically to share the connection, but sharing files in between the computers needn’t be disregarded either).
The computers in question:
WinXP box with Celeron processor (my current pc).
PII or III (don’t rightly recall atm,) running Win98
486 (yes, I know, OUCH, but it was the first pc in the house) running Win98.
Problem: The two older computers are in the basement. My computer will be on the second floor. Is it possible, or a good idea, to try running cables that long? Can I connect the computers directly (whether or not they’re in the same room), or do I need a router or hub? Will the older computers be able to handle the speed of the connection, or the stress of being networked to my XP box?
If anyone with experience can give me a few pointers, a definite ‘don’t bother’, or at least a starting point to start looking for information elsewhere, I’d greatly appreciate it!
You’re best off placing the router where the coax cable enters the house. Plug the cable-modem into the coax cable and plug the patch cord (Cat-5) into the router and your whole family can surf the net from your garage.
You want more Cat-5 cable. You can easily run lengths upwards of 200 feet.
Tuck them in along the moulding. Integrate them into your house with jacks. Maybe even go all out and set yourself up with Fiber.
Get thee a Linksys - they’re $70 - 80 and embarassingly easy to set up. I just patched up a home office network with a Linksys EtherFast 4-Port Cable/DSL router (BEFSR41) and it was so easy I’m almost feeling bad writing a bill… OTOH, they can perfom some neat tricks if you need more advanced functionality.
UTP Ethernet cables can be up to 100 meters - ehm, 328 feet ? - that should be enough, unless your parents live in a mansion. If you’re going to do a project like this, you’ll probably need to buy/borrow the crimping pliers, a bag of RJ-45 connectors and a reasnable length of bulk Cat5 cable - store-bought patch cable is quite unreasonably expensive, and it’s easy enough to make your own.
As for sharing drives between computers etc., that’s something I leave to the OS weenies
BTW the easiest way to run the cable from the basement to the 2nd floor, is to go up to the second floor and drop it down a vent if you have central air/heating.
Since you will run 100baseT for your home network, yes you can do it with spare. You will want to get a router/switch combo to connect to the cable modem, and connect your computers to it.
Do not do this. Please, please ignore this post completely. You are like violating your locale’s fire laws, and even if your locale doesn’t have real laws, your would be endangering your life and property. Running cable in plenums is not for DIYers.
Don’t throw that thing away! If you have the time, and want to learn about how networks work (as opposed to how they appear to windows users), put a recent Linux distro on it. If you want to be fancy, stick a secondary LAN card in it, and configure the thing as a firewall.
Sure, it’s more complicated than using a dedicated firewall (such as the Linksys NAT described above), but you will learn how it works. Proper knowledge / experience in TCP/IP / ethernet / firewalls is a very good thing to have in todays world, and I believe that it will become even more so in the future.
An old 486 isn’t much fun if you want to use the fancy graphical UI’s of today, but you have to remember that it still packs A LOT more computing power than the machines Unix was originaly designed for. By running Linux with a mostly-text / simple-graphics UI, it’s still a very useable machine. And if you want to understand the network aspect, there’s nothing better! (Although some people would probably recommend freeBSD, it does not have the same user base.)
Popup, there’s nothing I’d like to do more, as I already have the RedHat install cds just waiting for me to finish buying the pc off my roomate. But the 486 in question belongs to my step-dad, and he uses a lot of software that’s pretty specialised, and I doubt he could find Linux equivalents.