I finally ran some CAT5 through my house and set up my DSL router last night. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be–I was actually worried about crimping the ends on the cables more than anything, but I managed to make three cables of various lengths without screwing anything up. Now I just have to configure the router so HTTP and FTP services can be seen from outside the network–I’m actually considering reading the user’s manual for that. =)
It’d be fun to try and run a cable along the fence to my mom’s house, but it might be too far for it to work. Each of our property lines are 213 feet long front-to-back, and they meet along the back fence, but from the back of my house to the back of her house must be less than 250 feet. So it might work, but I don’t know if I’d want to buy a whole box of cable just to find out. Besides, my ISP probably wouldn’t be too happy if they were to find out about it.
The maxmimum distance for Cat5 if I remember my networking class correctly is 500 ft. You can buy a 1000ft spool for 40
330 feet or 100 meters is the approximate max. length of cat5. 1000′ Cat5e from Home Depot you can get for about $50, or cheaper on the web.
Jeez…LS Micro wants almost $80 for 1000′. I wouldn’t have expected Home Depot to be any cheaper. I guess I’ll go shopping there if I ever decided to wire any other rooms in my house.
One Word: Wireless. 🙂
Though if you want to try cable, I bet it would work. There’s gotta be some runs here at work that push/break the 100 meter limit. I would be willing to bet that if you have one straight run (no connections like wall plates, couplets, etc.) would go considerably further than that. Especially if you limit it to 10 megabit.
look into “nat” for what you need to do for the ftp and http services
-ben