"Andy Wade" wrote in message
...
John Rumm wrote:

Yup, when working with signals that are sent as a differential pair, it
is vital to make sure they are carried by a twisted pair. Just having the
right pins joined together is not enough at these frequencies.

It's also important to maintain the twisting of each pair right up as
close as possible to the IDC terminals of the socket. The 'as installed'
picture provided didn't show particularly good practice in this respect.

Now can I ask a supplementary Ethernet question about switches while all
the networking experts are around? Can you cascade the cheap unmanaged
switches /ad-infinitum/ and maintain communication between all nodes? For
example say two ports from a typical 4-port ADSL router, R, each feed
remote 8-port switches, A & B. Each switch provides 7 ports used to
connect local network devices. In this network will a device on switch A
be able to communicate with a device on switch B, via the switch in R?

--
Andy


More or less.

Try to maintain a 'tree' structure, and avoid any loops in the topology.
( ie there being 2 different routes between any 2 switches, for example
running a cable from A to B in your example, when there's already a route
via R )

Smarter switches will handle looped topology correctly, ( and indeed will
use this for redundancy ) using the 'spanning tree protocol', but cheap
switches will probably not, and this can result in odd behaviour where some
packets accelerate in a clockwise direction, colliding with an
anti-clockwise beam of packets. The resulting black hole will eat the
server room.

--
Ron