[olug] home network

[Chris Garrity]

Directly connecting 2 ethernet nics together in the way you're 
describing is possible. What you need is a "cross over" cable.

A "cross over" cable looks like any regular ethernet cabling, except the 
copper wires inside the cable meet the plastic plugs on the ends at 
different slots. If you hold the plug up in front of you, and view it 
from the top (with the latch release pointing down, and on the opposite 
side of where you're eyeball is), you'll see 8 slots into which copper 
wires can terminate. You can count the slots in the plug left to right 
as, say, slots 1, 2, 3, ... 8. For ethernet, wires need only occupy 
slots 1, 2, 3, and 6.

There are 4 pairs of wire inside the cabling,; blue, orange, green, and 
brown. Each of these wires has a corresponding white wire to go with it.

Say you put the blue wire in slot 1, blue's white wire in slot 2, the 
orange wire in slot 3, and the orange's white wire in slot 6 on one end 
of the cable. On the other end of the cable you would put the orange 
wire in slot 1, and the blue wire in slot 3.

To do this (easily) you need a small pair of wire cutters, two plugs, 
and a cable crimper; but if you're tenacious enough you could probably 
go without. Anyhow:

    http://www.makeitsimple.com/how-to/dyi_crossover.htm

Or; you probably find an already made crossover cable at the shops 
around town (can even get one a compusa these days).

But; in the long run you'll want a hub so you can add other computers to 
your network "on the fly" --- like if your friends bring their computers 
by and you all want to play Counter Strike over your LAN to challenge 
some other clan forming on the other side of the planet :-)

Nate wrote:

>I finally got linux on theinternet.  I'm into something new now.
>I have a dual boot system with windows on the other side, 2 nic cards
>one of which is connected to the internet and the other I wish to
>connect to my second computer in a network. The other computer is a
>single boot system with windows and one nic card I wish to connect to
>the first computer in a way that I can read and write both direction and
>can get on the internet with both computers.
>
>Is this possible without a hub or router?  If not at the very least I
>want to be able to talk back and forth between the two computers in a
>home network and would reluctantly settle for only the one uning the
>internet.
>
>Thanks very much,
>Nate
>
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