On Sat, 01 Oct 2011 19:59:33 -0400, wrote:

On Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:21:18 -0500, "
wrote:

When I was in the cabling biz at IBM I set un an experiment with CAT-3
trying to break an Ethermet or a Token Ring LAN doing every urban
legend bad thing anyone could think of (loops of cable over
fluorescent ballasts, running next to 480v 1600a feeders, taped to the
raceway, telephone in the same cable, exceeding the 300' rule, etc)
Basically I couldn't break it.

10-baseT, 4/16MB T/R only?

The original installation was 16mb TR but we also tried 10/100
Ethernet and it ran clean at 100 mb doing big file transfers and
looking at the logs. For the "over length" test I hooked the kludge we
had up to a new 300' spool so we had that plus the other hundred foot
baseband cable we were playing with and whatever was in the rack,
cables etc.

I'm somewhat surprised 100BaseT worked over CAT-3.

The whole thing got started when someone said we were having problems
because the router (in a rack) was backed up to the equipment room
wall where they had that 1600a service.

The router was bad.

Hate it when that happens.

I hooked up the spool, just for playing with TDR to get a little more
time down the wire but I had to try it. ;-)

TDRs are great tools. Too bad they're so rare (I suppose the people who know
how to use one are even more rare).