[olug] victory and defeat w/Linux router @work

[Charles Bird]

My place of employment just hit the 21st century, we have a 
killer line with a 2600 down to a cisco switch thats 
running some lower bandwidth stuff, thats owned by someone 
else.  Off of the second port coming out the 2600 is the 
cable to our switch, which is a netgear 16port, everything 
on this switch is fast as heck....we ran about 100M of cat6 
a couple weeks ago to our main building....it meets up with 
another netgear switch, i think its a 24port.  then daisied 
from that is another 2 24port netgears.  
 
Ok heres the thing, after the 100m run, we cant get a 
signal light on the daisy chained connection from sw-sw. So 
Just outta curiosity I built a Clark Connect router today 
and put that in between the switches, before the long run, 
I got a signal light then on both ends. its a switch 
somewhat "passive" in that they dont bump up signal much as 
where a router can act as a "relay"?   
I then configured the network in the main building and got 
the DNS thing figured out so I could get hosts resolved 
etc. but man o man is it slow. worse than dialup.  
The network is not congusted at all, two computers hooked 
up and 4 devises sending 200Kb/s on a DS3. 
 
I am assuming that the 100M run taxed the bandwidth alot 
even though 100M is supposed to be acceptable, as far as I 
know there is not too much RF in the 100M run.  So my 
question ladies and gents...is there a way to look at 
signal strength on there? And do any of the gurus have any 
words of wisdom.  
we are going to do some more trouble shooting tomorrow and 
I'm sure we'll find that its too long of a run, would a 
router in the middle help? 
I am not a network engineer, but I play one at work. 
   
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