Latest posts for the topic "New connection needed"

New connection needed

Renius — GMT

I just moved into the basement of a buddies house and there is no ethernet cord that is long enough to connect my computer to the router. So I am now in the market for a wireless card. I have no clue what i'm looking for. I know that there is a wide range of prices. I don't know if there are wireless cards that are faster than others but I want one that will be fast enough to play UT04 and 07. I won't be buyin one for a week and a half, so I don't need to decide it immediatly. If anyone got any ideas let me know. Thanks.

Re:New connection needed

BotFodder — GMT

802.11g = 54 Mbps spec 802.11b = 11 Mbps spec If the wireless access point/router that you're connecting to wirelessly supports 802.11g, and everyone else using the wireless connection is using 802.11g, then get an 802.11g card - you should be able to find something that does it cheaply. Anything that does 802.11g also does 802.11b (unless configured not to) - the issue is that if anyone using the access point has an old card that doesn't do g, the *everyone* gets stuck using b. There are card and router combinations that support either the 802.11n (I think it's n) spec (which is not finalized yet, near as I know) or a special 108 Mbps spec, but I have no experience with either. Honestly, even 802.11b should be able to handle the bandwidth needed for UT2004 - the 11 Mbps it's theoretically capable of is well over the usual 3 Mbps down/384 Kbps up of most cable systems, or the slower speeds of some ASDL. However, if you've got 20 people using the same access point at the same time, you'll notice some slowness in response. It's basically the same principle of using cable with all of your neighbors - you're sharing that signal. So, I guess the short answer is ... it really doesn't matter too much. It depends on the capabilities and usage of your current wireless access point and router, but if you get a b/g capable card, you should be set. I can't imagine that they're that expensive.

Re:New connection needed

MeanDevil — GMT

I had a similar problem when I was wiring in the LAN at my workplace. If they don't supply a CAT5 cable at your local computer store that's long enough to do the job, all you need to do is go to a electricial store (possibly wholesalers), order the required length of CAT5 data cable and 2 RJ45 connectors and ask them to connect them together. It's gonna be much more reliable and a far simpler solution (and probably less expensive) than worring about wireless cards. Best of luck. MD

Re:New connection needed

cplmac — GMT

I have a box of 1000' of Cat5e in the garage and a package of connectors. Steelace and I networked 16 connections throughout the house. It is the only way to fly. I'm sure we can work something out if you have a length you need, I would be willing to make it and send it you but you're gonna have to cover postage.

Re:New connection needed

Renius — GMT

I was talkin to my roommates about our connection and the router that we have is through qwest which I was told is a 802.11g.

BotFodder: Anything that does 802.11g also does 802.11b (unless configured not to) - the issue is that if anyone using the access point has an old card that doesn't do g, the *everyone* gets stuck using b.

My 3 roommates all have wireless cards and it turns out that one of them is using a b. L-)

MeanDevil If they don't supply a CAT5 cable at your local computer store that's long enough to do the job, all you need to do is go to a electricial store (possibly wholesalers), order the required length of CAT5 data cable and 2 RJ45 connectors and ask them to connect them together.

I was lookin online for some CAT5e cable and it looks like I could get 100ft for $20 http://www.computercablestore.com/SearchResult.aspx?CategoryID=167 . I haven't decided yet if I want to drill a whole in the floor and cut the length needed to 20 ft or if I want to get the 75 or 100ft cable. Another thing that confussed me is that last night my roommate told me that used to be connected to the router through a cat5 but it was slow so he had to get a wireless card. I don't think that he knows what he is talking about but it really confused me, cuz I thought that connecting through a cable was faster than wireless. The people that I have talked to today have said the opposite. There is more latency with the wireless and for gaming it isn't the best. This is what I tought, but I don't know. Thanks for the help. :D

Re:New connection needed

Renius — GMT

Thanks for the offer cpl, I'll measure it out to see exactly how much I will need. Right now it looks like it would either be about 60 feet or 85 feet (I don't know how long my cable is and i'm about 10 or 15 feet short). If it is close to 75 or 100 then I'll just buy it, but If it's not close to 75 or 100, it would be nice not to have an extra 20 feet jammed behind my computer. I'll let you know what I find out.

Re:New connection needed

Sour_Grape — GMT

CAT5 is really reliable, and faster, up to 25-30 feet. Longer than that and you start getting some packet loss. Some people say you can go up to 100 feet without loss, but that hasn't been my experience. I know some engineers who refuse to go longer than 16 feet without a repeater hub. Of course all these things depend on how reliable your connection needs to be. Similar to buffered and nonbuffered RAM. For solid gaming I wouldn't recommend longer than the 25 feet. Longer than that and you might as well be using a good wireless connection.

Re:New connection needed

Fro13 — GMT

$7 for 100ft. Cat5E cable http://microbarn.com/Network_Cables_NCB-100--51-164-100130.html This is where I bought my 100ft cable from. It doesn't look they have 75 ft cables anymore though. I'm not having any problems with packetloss, nothing noticable anyway. You could go with the Cat6 cable if you want to make sure. It's only $5 more.

Re:New connection needed

Renius — GMT

So I just found out that our connection is not cable but is actually DSL. Does the speed of the dsl effect wether i should use the cat5, cat6 or a wireless card?

Re:New connection needed

MeanDevil — GMT

Nop, it has no impact. Cable is fibre optic, DSL is piped in via a phone line. Both produce the same results to the end user. I would suggest you go with the CAT5 cable, I've never experinced any problems with mine and I have at least 100ft stashed under my floor boards! With the wireless connection you are much more likely to get signal interferance and disconnections. Go get your drill and punch a hole in that floor of yours! It'll only take 5 mins :-B

Re:New connection needed

v0rTeX — GMT

Sour_Grape wrote:

CAT5 is really reliable, and faster, up to 25-30 feet. Longer than that and you start getting some packet loss. Some people say you can go up to 100 feet without loss, but that hasn't been my experience.

You must have some crappy cable. I have a spool with exactly 200 feet of CAT5e on it and I use it to bridge my router and my switch together at LAN parties. We have never once noticed a hitch in network performance. From Wikipedia (because I couldnt think of a faster source)

CAT5e...horizontal cables are still limited to a maximum of 90m in length...

90m = approximately 300 feet (guaranteed to be at least 292 feet)

Re:New connection needed

Chyster — GMT

Yup, I figure that if you have to go any farther than a cat5 will work, you just need to go on and build a house there and get a cable drop put in or some such. Cat5 is good for almost the length of a football field for those challenged in distance recognition. :)

Re:New connection needed

320 — GMT

The wireless would be fine, but it's up to you if you want to go through the hassle with wired. 80211b is fine (like Bot said). But you might as well buy a G card. A generic rule of thumb is to buy the same brand of card as the wireless router.

Re:New connection needed

cplmac — GMT

Our house has a 16 connection hub plugging all the machines together. Every cable on that hub is more than 50' long. The one I play on is about 150' long because I had to go down into the basement with it and then up into the attic and then down through my bedroom wall to the wall plate. Basement is half drywalled on the ceiling (the half under my room) so I had to make the run up through the attic. To further degrade my connection I actually spliced into the existing 50' in the basement. No problems no packet loss no nothing, just good wholesome gaming.

Re:New connection needed

MeanDevil — GMT

cplmac wrote:

Our house has a 16 connection hub plugging all the machines together. Every cable on that hub is more than 50' long. The one I play on is about 150' long because I had to go down into the basement with it and then up into the attic and then down through my bedroom wall to the wall plate. Basement is half drywalled on the ceiling (the half under my room) so I had to make the run up through the attic. To further degrade my connection I actually spliced into the existing 50' in the basement. No problems no packet loss no nothing, just good wholesome gaming.

I wish I lived in a house full of gamers, it would be so much more fun than living with my brother...who can't even burn a CD! Bah, I feel like I'm missing out. CPL - can I come round your house for tea tonight?

Re:New connection needed

BotFodder — GMT

Ethernet spec is 100 m for CAT 5/5e/6 cable (for all speeds - 10/100/1000 - I'm pretty sure) - that's from a switched port to end point. Hubs aren't usually switched ports and are simply repeaters, and for best results should be considered "mid points" in the 100 m spec. So anything from a switched port to 300 feet should be okay, save for the quality of the cable. If you're talking unshielded, you might potentially get interference from outside sources (though the nature of twisted pair cabling should minimize that issue). If there are a lot of kinks in it (I'm not talking turns around corners and such - I mean real kinks) that *might* cause issues.

Re:New connection needed

v0rTeX — GMT

... and on that note, if you are using a hub instead of a switch, come to my house so I can smack you in the back of your head. What are people thinking when they buy a hub? Switches are the same price and so much better. I can back up the statement about kinks in the line. Electrons don't like to flow around sharp corners and square edges. It acts like a resistor (moreso than just a length of copper would) and then the voltage reaching the other end won't always be high enough to be recognized as a '1' instead of a '0'.

Re:New connection needed

Spacey — GMT

It is not necessarily true that anything which does 11g can do 11b. There are two different radios involved here, and some wireless cards (and some access points) have reduced their cost by dropping 11b. As for 11n and other higher speed 802.11 specs, it is quite true that the specs are not finallized 100%. I happen to work for a wireless networking company, and we actively participate on most, if not all of the various of the 802.11 standards groups. However, at least one vendor, D-Link (who is a customer/OEM partner of ours) has a 108Mbps product. But when dealing with such extensions, realize that they are pulling tricks to achieve this, and one vendor's product may not play well with those of other vendors. Now, WRT the bandwidth...As fodder says, 11b would suffice if we are talking just UT. The reason for this is that in many cases (more on this in a sec), the limitation will not be on your wireless connection, but on your WAN connection through your ISP, on out to the servers. Indeed, I remember talking with Dru about him trying to limit network usage to that of a T1, which would be 1.5Mbps. As for when the wireless connection will be the limiter...when you have a number of wireless nodes, there will come a time when each node will only get a portion of that bandwidth. Indeed, many advanced APs will provide settings to limit the bandwidth used per client. As for which one I would get...I would get something which supports g if not both, as the cost for the type of equipment you would get for that is not that much more. (As for wanting to buy from my employer...our equipment is for a much larger deployment, such as for entire office buildings, hospitals, college campuses or even cities like Koln, Germany.) Oh... BTW...There are other things which you need to think about when dealing with wireless. They include: - Security. If you plan on doing anything you would not put on a poster outside your house...read up on the subject, read the manuals, and configure your security parameters!! - RF Propagation. Are you looking at a house with walls made with old mortar&lath, concrete, bricks, metal studs, etc.? Depending on what the walls are made of and the layout of where your AP and computer will be, you may need multiple APs, or even still have to run your wires all the way. Our house uses mortar and lath, and I have an AP in my office even with one just down the hall. The reason is that my office has a blind spot where the signal effectively passes through about 2-3 feet of mortar just because it is glancing down the wall. - OS support. While this is generally not a problem with windows, if you are running Linux, you will likely find that you have to go through some hurdles to use some of the newer cards, even with the latest release of the distro. :( And Fodder...good reply on the whole, but you will find that you can get DSL with well over 6000/768 now with no problems. My NSP is checking the line to see how much over my current 3000/768 I can run on my DSL connection before I upgrade. But even without that upgrade, I can still suck my employer's WAN connection dry (they have two T1's). :D

BotFodder wrote:

Anything that does 802.11g also does 802.11b (unless configured not to) - the issue is that if anyone using the access point has an old card that doesn't do g, the *everyone* gets stuck using b. There are card and router combinations that support either the 802.11n (I think it's n) spec (which is not finalized yet, near as I know) or a special 108 Mbps spec, but I have no experience with either. Honestly, even 802.11b should be able to handle the bandwidth needed for UT2004 - the 11 Mbps it's theoretically capable of is well over the usual 3 Mbps down/384 Kbps up of most cable systems, or the slower speeds of some ASDL. However, if you've got 20 people using the same access point at the same time, you'll notice some slowness in response. It's basically the same principle of using cable with all of your neighbors - you're sharing that signal. So, I guess the short answer is ... it really doesn't matter too much. It depends on the capabilities and usage of your current wireless access point and router, but if you get a b/g capable card, you should be set. I can't imagine that they're that expensive.

Re:New connection needed

Spacey — GMT

Sour_Grape wrote:

CAT5 is really reliable, and faster, up to 25-30 feet. Longer than that and you start getting some packet loss. Some people say you can go up to 100 feet without loss, but that hasn't been my experience. I know some engineers who refuse to go longer than 16 feet without a repeater hub. Of course all these things depend on how reliable your connection needs to be. Similar to buffered and nonbuffered RAM. For solid gaming I wouldn't recommend longer than the 25 feet. Longer than that and you might as well be using a good wireless connection.

Funny, I have one link though my house which is around 150', due to the wierd routing. I run this link at 100Mbps full duplex and and easily get it to well over the 90% point, at which point, the non-electrical protocol limitations start in. And even with longer runs at my various employers and clients (which included places like CompuServe and Lucent), and over at the radio observatory, I know of links which were right about the 100m limit, and even then, there was no significant packet loss or latency. But at these distances and data rates, I generally start thinking GigE and fiber. :D EDIT: As Fodder points out, running unshielded cable can leave you open to some interference, so don't run it past large motors like you find in your fridge or AC compressors, etc., and you should also stay several feet away from neon lights, and such. The electrical characteristics of twisted pair and the ethernet signaling will generally protect you, but why risk problems?? And as for kinks, a good rule of thumb for bends in Cat5/5e is to go no tighter than the outer edge on a CD where possible, and never go tigher than the inner edge of the reflective area. While it may not seem that bad, if you throw a TDR (time domain reflectometer) onto a line with a tight turn, you will start seeing signal reflections off those tight turns, and at the same time, those become points where the twisted pair will be more vulnerable to RFI. On the hub-switch debate...you do need to think about this a bit (I never go with hubs, unless I want to snoop the traffic on another port for debugging purposes). But complicating this whole issue are some products which are called hubs, but in reality are really just extremely very dumb switches. I bought a 10/100 hub a few years ago from Linksys (who I will not buy from now), only to find out that it was in reality a switch. I spent several hours one day trying to figure out why I was not seeing the packets I was looking for, until I noticed that I was only seeing broadcast packets and those headed for the host on that port. And vortex...it is not resistance, but rather the change in impedence (complex part), as you are changing both the capacitance and inductance (both mutual and self) of the pair. The discontinuity only comes into play when considering the twisted pair as an antenna for RFI purposes. I learned this one from folks who learned from Dr. John Kraus, whose EM and Antennas books are still the standard some 60 years after they were written, as well as from John himself.

Re:New connection needed

v0rTeX — GMT

Spacey wrote:

And vortex...it is not resistance, but rather the change in impedence (complex part), as you are changing both the capacitance and inductance (both mutual and self) of the pair.

Given how few people in a crowd normally understand electronics and communications in that depth, I didn't see a need to confuse anyone. :wink:

Re:New connection needed

Renius — GMT

So I finally figured out what I am going to do to connect my computer to the server of all serves THE "disastrous consequences". My roommates said that they didn't mind if I drilled a hole in the floor so I'll just connect to the router with a 20 ft cat5. Should work out perfectly. Thanks every one for all the help. I had no clue what I should do. :?: I should be back soon, so BotFodder you had two weeks to enjoy all my kills but now I want them back. :twisted:

Re:New connection needed

BotFodder — GMT

Bah, between the possibly 7-14 levels I may have lost from the crash and the various computer-related aches my right hand has been suffering, you might have a chance. ;) I had just maxed out DB too ... :cry: