Ted, did you do any network saturation testing?
I suspect this configuration will work fine as long as there is not a lot of concurrent traffic between many different machines.
The big problem with this setup is whether all stations will see collisions within the 10BaseX parameters - if not then you could get situations where throughput is very poor. However, for only a few stations and very restricted traffic patterns you might have on a home network it might work very well.
I run a mixed cat5/Coax network at home but have never dared break the rules so blatently - I'd be very interested in a later report of your experiences.
Interesting Jim
On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
Hi Folks,
I had always laboured under the belief that when you implement a network using coaxial ethernet cable, you basically had to have a single linear cable with pick-off at T-pieces along its length, and that branching coax structures were not on.
In particular, if you needed, say, to connect a laptop [C] to an ethernet between machines [A] and [B], and it wasn't feasible to extend the cable beyond [A] or [B] to reach [C] but the middle of the cable itself passed not too far from [C], then I thought that the only solution was to bring the cable in a long loop to [C] and connect to a T-piece in the middle of the cable. I.e.
[A]--------- -------------[B] | | | | | | | | | | \ / T | [C]
However, thinking about it a bit and then trying it out, I discover that you can in fact set up a branching coax network. The trick is to use spare T-pieces to implement the branching. Like this:
[A]----------T-------------[B] =I [T-piece at 90 degrees] | | [C]-----=I [T-piece on branch cable] | | [more machines on branch if you like] | =I [terminated T-piece to close branch]
The trick is the first T-piece at 90 degrees, whose lateral ("male") insert is plugged into the "female" socket of the T-piece doing its usual job on the main cable. The ("female") end of the "branch" cable is then put onto the other "male" insert of the first T-piece at 90 degrees. This piece of trickery ensures valid connection (and indeed functions just like the normal connection at the ethernet card).
And you will of course need a terminated T-piece at the far end of the "branch" cable in the usual way.
No doubt this could be extended to a whole tree of coax, though shortage of spare T-pieces (and spare machines to hook onto them to test it) prevents me from testing it.
Apologies if it's not new to you, but since I hadn't heard of it being done before I thought I'd share the idea.
Best wishes to all, Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 [NB: New number!] Date: 26-Sep-04 Time: 16:25:41 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------