I've just got a chance to have a look at the Mk2, after running the clone operation against the Mk1 (worked flawlessly)
I thought I'd try connecting to the player via ethernet, so I dug out an RJ45 crossover cable I had lying around (the rest of the computers are networked with coax, T-pieces and terminators) and plugged it in between the RJ45 socket on the PC and the empeg.
But I can't figure out how to tell Emplode to talk to the empeg using ethernet.
I'll freely admit that I haven't fully read the manual, just a quick glance to see if I could find the answer (but who honestly reads manuals except as a final resort?)
Am I doing something wrong? Maybe I can't have RJ45 & coax coming through the one network card? (which is probably the case, knowing my luck!)

Apart from that, the player seemed very unstable until I installed beta 11c, which seems to have cured it; and the rotary knob seems ever-so-slightly off-centre, so it rubs against the faceplate once every rotation. No big deal at the minute, and it will probably loosen up with use, so I'm not too worried about that myself.

Basically, I'm as happy as the proverbial pig in the proverbial... well... you know what I mean

Geoff
---- -------
Got one of the first Mark 2 empegs...

You will need to use your ethernet card diagnostic to set the card to UTP instead of coax. Some card drivers allow you to do this under "properties" in Win9x network configuration. Many have a DOS based diagnostic program that sets this parameter, and quite a few will auto-select the UTP if you disconnect the coax then power up with the UTP connected.

Good luck!

Am I doing something wrong? Maybe I can't have RJ45 & coax coming through the one network card? (which is probably the case, knowing my luck!)

Yep, that's it. If it's an old card, you might even have to crack open the computer and set some jumpers. Hope you've got a manual for that thing!

___________
Tony Fabris

There is a document on the CD called 'How to synchronise over ehternet.txt'. Read that first.

--
David
// I'm probably not speaking on behalf of empeg here...

After reading the manual file on the CD "How-to-synchronise-over-ethernet.txt" and doing as i was told to, everything works with eth ...
well just a synchro failure after everything is done, but this is just a lie, everything was synchronized alright ... :-)


Nils

What version of MSIE are you running / have you installed?

..it's good to see that nt4 users can finally take advantage of something faster then serial:)
-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

Ok, first off, a huge *DOH* to me for not looking at the CD (I could say I was busy ripping some audio CDs at the time, but I'm afraid I can't even use that in my defense as it's not true)

I had a sinking feeling that RJ45 & coax couldn't be used together on the one card, so I dug another network card out of a 'spare' PC and was about to try installing it specifically for the empeg, with my fingers, toes and everything crossed hoping I'd have a spare IRQ available. Alas, I forgot to cross something for a spare ISA slot in the PC, so I was thwarted again!!

As there was a basic requirement that I get some sleep before going to work I had to give up temporarily... Maybe I'll go out and buy a hub or something - it's about time I bought another gadget - it's been 24 hours since I got the last one

Geoff
---- -------
Got one of the first Mark 2 empegs...

Buying a HUB was my first idea, but Tony had already given you a clue at the time, so I didn't say anything :)

Buy yourself a 10/100mb hub, they don't cost too much more than a 10mb, and you will enjoy the speed. (If you have 100mb NIC's that is)

TommyE

unless you buy a crappy one, in which case, if any of its ports are at 10, all ports run at 10. If you've also got crappy 3com cards (or was it Intel?) that are 100 onlyrather than switchable, you're stuffed.

The voice of bitter experience has spoken.

Looks like I'd better choose carefully.
I expect I may get a 10/100 hub initially and upgrade the network cards as and when I have a few shillings lying around.
The main problem I see is that at the minute, some of the computers are spread around the house (although 3 + the empeg will be in one room!) and the coax is tracked up the walls. Some hubs can have a BNC connector in addition to the RJ45s, so could I have a couple of machines running off the hub's BNC connector with the rest on RJ45?
The empeg is only 10Mbs anyway as I recall, would that not cause problems on a 100BaseT network?
(I set up the network at home on the cheap several years back, and coax has served me ok so far, so I have never had to worry about 10/100/RJ45/hubs etc hence all the questions!)

Geoff
---- -------
Got one of the first Mark 2 empegs...

I expect I may get a 10/100 hub initially and upgrade the network cards as and when I have a few shillings lying around.

I don't know the environment you're in or what you're planning for the network's usage, but for most home networks, 10mbps is more than enough. I wouldn't even waste the cash on a 10/100 hub at this point.

The main problem I see is that at the minute, some of the computers are spread around the house (although 3 + the empeg will be in one room!)

Sounds exactly like my house. I was so happy when I finally networked my computer, my wife's computer, and my daughter's computer. Now we can share files, print to each other's printers, and (when I get broadband to my house someday) share a 'net connection.

Some hubs can have a BNC connector in addition to the RJ45s, so could I have a couple of machines running off the hub's BNC connector with the rest on RJ45?

Damn, that's a good question! I've never tried that. I've either been all-RJ45 or all-BNC, but never a mixture. Does anyone have experience with this? Even the cheap hubs seem to have a BNC connector, too. I always assumed that plug was for daisychaining hubs and not for mixing 10baseT networks with coax networks. But I never tried.

The empeg is only 10Mbs anyway as I recall, would that not cause problems on a 100BaseT network?

Only if you get a hub that will ONLY do 100. Then none of your 10 stuff will work on it. If you get a hub that'll autosense between 10 and 100, it should be OK. Of course, I think someone said that the cheap hubs will throttle back the whole network to 10 if there's any 10s plugged into it.

(I set up the network at home on the cheap several years back, and coax has served me ok so far, so I have never had to worry about 10/100/RJ45/hubs etc hence all the questions!)

I tried doing some LAN parties with coax, and although it "served me OK" too, it was a bitch to set up an ad-hoc network that way, and it always took two hours before all our machines could see each other. When we switched to 10baseT, suddenly setup went from hours to minutes and everything worked like a charm.

Of course, if you can get the "mix" thing working with the BNC connector, you'll be sitting pretty. I'll tell ya, for someone with "only-coax" experience, you seem to know a lot about 10baseT. For instance, knowing that a crossover cable is required when you connect two computers directly to each other: That's something most 10baseT newbies don't know about. I'm impressed.

___________
Tony Fabris

Mixed works fine. The coax is limited to 10M only. Check your UTP cables... Cat 3 is limited to 10M, Cat 5 is good for 10M or 100M. Hanging a UTP hub off of a coax run acts just like any other device hung on that coax run, no problems there. Keep in mind that you have a limit of 100 meters on a UTP segment. I think I remember that coax (thinnet) is limited to 300 meters.

One issue that crops up occasionally with UTP is daisy-chaining the hubs. Try to have no more than 3 hubs between any two points on the network. Timing issues start getting very wierd after that...

A buddy of mine (with more money than sense!) has a two story house. His play-room is upstairs and has a 8-port hub and 7 machines. His wife then wanted a computer downstairs in the living room. She then wanted one in the kitchen, then one outside on the patio... Well he ran one wire to the living room. Then put in a hub and ran a wire to the kitchen, then put a hub there and ran a wire to the patio. Everything was fine until he got a cable-modem... You guessed it. He added another hub between it and his play-room. We had a devil of a time finding the problem because it was very sporadic, it only cropped up occasionally when he had a computer hooked up on the patio! We cured it by putting a larger hub in the play-room and removing the hub between the cable-modem and the play-room.

Some hubs can have a BNC connector in addition to the RJ45s, so could I have a couple of machines running off the hub's BNC connector with the rest on RJ45?


Damn, that's a good question! I've never tried that. I've either been all-RJ45 or all-BNC, but never a mixture. Does anyone have experience with this? Even the cheap hubs seem to have a BNC connector, too. I always assumed that plug was for daisychaining hubs and not for mixing 10baseT networks with coax networks. But I never tried.


I have used this setup about 3 years ago. Was an absolute pig to maintain, 50 devices on 10/100BaseT with a 15 device 10Base2 spur off a dumb hub sitting on the main switch, another 2 dumb hubs sat on this spur with another 6 devices each!
Throughput was terrible, but it was only for the sales and marketing departments

You have quite a lot of room for expansion with ethernet. My home network
consists of a linux fileserver/internet gateway connected via 100baseTX to a
switching hub, which is connected to two other PC's, and a 10baseT hub via the
uplink port. This hub connects to another couple of slower PC's, and also to
the original 10base2 coax I put in some years back, which links in a RiscPC and
an Alpha box. In addition I have two laptops for roving use connected to the
fileserver via radio ethernet.

It's a somewhat odd installation, and took a little fiddling to get working
correctly, but is that way because it sort of grew as my requirements expanded.
As well, I never throw anything away.

Everything works pretty well, and is reliable. A MK.II would simply plug into
either of the hubs.

Patrick.

Opinions expressed in this email may contain up to 42% water by weight, and are mine. All mine.

Thanks for the advice. The network here really is just to allow file/printer sharing around the house. I have a small socks proxy running on one machine to allow using the dial-up web connection remotely, and have ambitions to set up an old 486 as a sort of intranet server but apart from that it's pretty basic.

As for:

In reply to:

---

I'll tell ya, for someone with "only-coax" experience, you seem to know a lot about 10baseT. For instance, knowing that a crossover cable is quired when you connect two computers directly to each other: That's something most 10baseT newbies don't know about. I'm impressed.

---

well, there's a good explanation for that
About this time last year, myself and a work colleague were working across the water for a few weeks, and as we both had company laptops, and managed to find an external CDROM (our company laptops aren't that impressive!) we brought a Starcraft CD and a crossover cable and whiled away a few hours in the hotel each evening playing games

Geoff
---- -------
Got one of the first Mark 2 empegs...

Thanks, good advice about daisy-chaining the hubs. The "no more than three" thing is well known amongst LAN administrators, but I don't think that it's the sort of thing they put into the user manuals in those D-link SOHO networking kits.

By the way, the Cat5/10baseT length limit is 326 feet. I became acutely aware of this when we moved to a new building across the parking lot and literally strung a Cat5 cable from one second-story window to the server room in the new building during the transitional phase of the move. It worked like a charm, but I was sweating it for a while until the actual cable run was complete. It came out to about 310 feet.

___________
Tony Fabris

Isn't coax 2mbit?


coax or 10Base2 should run at 10Mb but you've obviously got all the devices sharing bandwidth so performance is terrible for all but the smallest of networks - as with a dumb hub should be fine for home use.
The 300ft max length does ring some vague bells, I knew I'd stuck those 2 hubs in there for some reason and now Tony says I could've run on for another 26ft - Damn

I'd have to go against what Tony said about the 10/100 issue. Try to get everything 10/100, so that in the future, you won't have to replace that much equipment. 10/100 hubs anymore are almost as cheap as just 10 hubs. And the speed increase is well worth the cost when copying many files to a machine in the corner for backup or whatever.

I have a 10/100 5 port switch hooked to another 10/100 8 port hub and a 10 8 port hub. The switch has three machines on it, and hooks to the other two hubs. The 10 has my cable modem, and one system on it. The rest of the ports are for lan parties. The 10/100 is used upstairs, and currently has 3 systems and my Airport on it. Eventually it will have 6 systems and my empeg, and the downstairs switch will probably be replaced to have room for my printer and everything downstairs on one hub. Plus my Dreamcast, and future PS2, X-Box, and MP3 stereo player will probably need a port downstairs.

There are some older standards that run 2mbit on COAX called Arcnet.
These cards are rare these days, but I remember setting dips so that each
card had its unique hardware adress.

TommyE

>Some hubs can have a BNC connector in addition to the RJ45s, so could I have a
>couple of machines running off the hub's BNC connector with the rest on RJ45?

Damn, that's a good question! I've never tried that. I've either been all-RJ45 or all-BNC, but never a mixture. Does anyone have experience with this? Even the cheap hubs seem to have a BNC connector, too. I always assumed that plug was for daisychaining hubs and not for mixing 10baseT networks with coax networks. But I never tried.

In my experience, the coax usually shares a port allocation with a port (say, port 1). You can then only use either, not both.

I don't have much experience lately with switching hubs but I imagine that most cheap hubs these days will default to the lowest bandwidth ie.10
Are most hubs these days automatically switching speeds for each port?



____________________________
Murray

do you mea 'hub' or 'repeater'?

____________________________
Murray