On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, James Wilkinson wrote:
> [...]
> IIRC there are some splitter cables out there that do almost the same
> thing. The highschool I used to go to has had a lot of cable laid in
> the last few years, and when I was there recently a friend who does the
> sysadminning there showed me these strange cables. They used them on
> the patch panel, and feed two nodes into one. Of course, the single-end
> of the cable(s) has to plug into a port that knows it can use the other
> wires.
You can buy these premade from lots of places. There are different
wirings, depending on what you are splitting: phone/phone, phone/data,
data/data. You need a matched pair, one at each end of the cable.
> I think the deal was that they were recommended by the (dodgy) store
> they got the equipment from, and the network engineer who came in to
> install the patch panels and the switches said that they were flaky and
> to never touch them ;)
If well made, they work well. If cheap, you get what you pay for.
I use them, but would only really recommend them if expanding the cabling
is not an option. They are bulky to have hanging off your patch panel and
this can cause flakiness.
You will also find that most connectors are lossy or have some crosstalk
which may cause them to fail various cable tests and even make full duplex
100Mbps not work over the full distance.
Golden rule - run at least double the number of cables that you need, even
if you don't terminate them all at first. Pulling extra cables without
breaking things is often a real pain.
Gordon
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