In article ,
"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2010-07-08, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article ,
"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2010-07-07, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article ,
"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2010-07-07, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article ,
"J. Clarke" wrote:

[ ... ]

Sounds like you are thankful that *you* did not try to do it
yourself. :-)

Absolutely. I've pulled my share of wire over the years, and old houses
are the
worst.

I can believe that.

[ ... ]

Of course. I've got a wireless bridge running to a friend's
house across the street and down one house -- using circular waveguide
antennas which I machined up. Encryption enabled, good aggressive
firewall on each end, and all logins from one side to the other via ssh.

I'm assuming that you added the waveguide antennas to standard wireless LAN
equipment.

Right. A bit more directionality and gain -- to improve our
signal during nasty weather, and to somewhat reduce people in a position
to snoop on the signals -- even with all the protection in place.

[ ... ]

Actually, the best thing to install is plastic conduit, if one has the
opportunity to do it reasonably easily, like if the walls are already
open for some other reason.

Hmm ... specifically plastic? Is there a problem running
twisted-pair ethernet in close proximity to a metal surround? I know
that some of the network wiring we installed at work was shielded
four twisted pair cable. Or is plastic conduit simply less expensive?

CAT5 and CAT5e are not shielded, so running in steel conduit may cause
unexpected losses and reflections.

O.K. That I can accept.

But I have not tried this. CAT7 is
shielded, so running in steel conduit would have no effect. I don't recall
if CAT6 is shielded, but I think it is unshielded. J.Clarke may know more.

Turns out that CAT6 is unshielded, so CAT7 it would be.


But my reason for plastic was economic, not technical.

O.K. Out of curiosity -- how long does it take a motivated
mouse to gnaw through the wall of a plastic conduit? (Motivation could
be fingerprints from the sandwich the installer was eating. :-)

Hmm. I've never heard of this happening, and lots of plastic conduit and pipe
is used. Mice are lazy too. They would lick the conduit clean before trying to
gnaw through.

I assume that part of the conduit development process was to pick a plastic
formulation that does not taste good to rodents. It's certainly a big deal for
wire and conduit intended for direct burial.

Joe Gwinn