I've got the "one or more unavailable" status also.
JesseKnows: Great find on the
crimper. I'm sure it's not the greatest quality but for $13 who cares? You can buy ends and stranded CAT5 by the foot at any ma/pop computer store or even at Home Depot. You can also just buy a 50' pre-made cable and cut it up to the length you like. That said, last time I made cables I felt like a real fool for having wasted 10 min per sloppy home-made cable just to save a dollar or two. Even with a $13 crimper, you'd have to make a half-dozen or so cables before breaking even.
RobsTV: BNC can be handy for simple linear arrangements, but if your computers are in a T or other shape, it's really awful. And while adding a computer to the
end of a BNC chain is a simple task of bringing down the entire network and laying a new cable segment, adding a computer to the middle of the chain (as is the case 99% of the time) is a horrific nightmare of crimpers and meters, and struggling to find T connectors that work and checking the terminators over and over, then swapping out terminators to try to find one that works, then bending the coax just right, then...
The major problem with BNC as I'm sure you know is that it pretty much
never works.
Add that to the fact that
any problem, no matter how small (like a cable not being bent just right) causes a total catastrophic failure of the entire network that often requires hundreds of man-hours to trace and correct.
- BNC is also 1/10 the speed of TP
- Neither hot-swappable nor fault tolerant
- Can't be integrated into the building with wall jacks (the most professional BNC installation I've ever seen was where the installer kicked a big hole in the wall with his boot and then dragged the cable through that hole up through the crawl-space and out another hole at the next computer. Unfortunately, all his hard work was in vain because the cable curved just slightly as it went through one of the holes and so of course the entire network was completely inoperative.
- BNC is Incompatible with all but the oldest laptops and print servers
- Uses a stiff, bulky, ugly, and difficult to hide cable that protrudes from both
sides of the computer rather than straight out the back like the rest of the cables.
- And finally, BNC is incompatible with any post-war products which is why you need to put all those network cards in your "main" computer to connect to your router.
You can get a TP hub for the price of a length of coax these days so TP is actually cheaper - and you don't even need to get out your Ohm meter to set it up! You can use any switch, hub, or router with your DSL. There are even a multitude of products that are 4,5, or 8 port 10/100 switches with integrated WAN interfaces that will connect all your computers to one another and the internet while serving as a transparent and maintenance-free hardware firewall. For example, the
$47 Belkin 4-port router that others have been buying.
Come on
RobsTV, at least upgrade to Lantastic or something. Anything is better than BNC.