On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Rob O'Donnell wrote:
At 14:23 29/09/2004, John Foust wrote:
I agree, and I suspect any straight-through RJ-45
cable
was for a telephone system, not networking. Perhaps
Sellam knows examples.
I've encountered flat 8 core cable, terminated with RJ45's, used as
patch leads in a Serial environment. They were used with Baydek
SMUX serial boards, also seen them used with some Specialix
terminal servers, both had RJ45 sockets for the serial ports.
Of course, when one of my colleagues tried to use them for Ethernet
we had terrible problems. They would just about work (for the
short lengths in a patch cabinet) at 10Mbps, but were total no-no
at 100Mbps.
You can use just about anything for short runs. Even 100-base-T
might work with 4-strands of random wire at some minimal distance.
But if you expect anything to run and run reliably, especially at a
distance, use properly rated cable :)
Indeed, I have used 10ft piece of round phone cable (not UTP) with RJ45s
to run 100BaseT, and gotten a full 12MB/sec or so out of it. However,
"results may not be typical".
Pat
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Purdue University ITAP/RCS ---