LostCircuits, Networking Guide

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Network Odyssey,

A humorous approach to building a LAN ( by MS)

What do you do if you have two PCs but limited disk space and every time you want to use a program, it is guaranteed to be on the other machine? Simple, you hook the two machines together via a local area network (LAN). You wish! Since I don't think I am the only one who has this kind of problems like family feud over who is going to use the internet, I decided it might be a good idea to give a brief description of the problems encountered on the long and thorny way to a functional LAN. BTW, I consider myself one of these computer illiterates with terrible half knowledge which leads you into all kinds of problems (hehe).

Day 1:

Had to return a defect scanner and for convenience reasons decided to meet the vendor at a nearby computer fair. Kept my eyes open for Ethernet products, since I kind of liked the idea of print sharing, going on-line with both machines and so on. Found myself lured into buying two SMC 9332 10-100 ethernet cards (not inexpensive but I still think they are terrific) and had my mind set on rushing home, installing the cards and playing a Quake Death match against my son. The first doubts came when I realized that, despite the fact that quite a few vendors were selling network products, one essential component namely the cables were unobtainable at the fair. I let myself be brushed off with the hints that Radio Shack and The WIZ would carry those (LOL) and went home. Installation of the cards wasn't a problem at all in Win 95 except that one of my machines (AMD K6 200 on an Alton VXPro motherboard) wouldn't recognize the card as what it was but as a DEC card. After spending two more hours trying to buy RJ-45 cables or connectors at any of the local electronic places, I terminated the project for the day.

Day 2:

A computer technician (Harry) at work gave me a cable that looked like it would do the job. My hopes raised high, I returned home, plugged in the cable and ... nothing. Luckily, SMC has a pretty good webpage and also technical support available. So I called them and, of course, the problem was that the cable I was using was wired straight through instead of crossover (because I do no use a HUB but a direct connection from one machine to the other). O.K., I didn't have another cable at hand and no connectors either, so ..... let's sleep one more night and then set it up correctly.

Day 3:

Returned the first cable and got another, old connector cable from someone else (Nick) with a few spare connectors, just in case I would have to rewire. SMC had faxed me the exact configuration for the crossover cable and it was a 10 min job to make the right cable. I also downloaded their configuration and setup/diagnostics utility from their web page (very helpful) and, after getting back home, made a new crossover cable, plugged it in and .... nothing. Well, almost nothing, the green LEDs in the back of the cards were lighting up, the self test of either card worked, but nothing else, not even the two node diagnostics. Called their help line again and the technician, of course, asked me to read him the colors of the wires in connectors. Now, if you want to see the colors of the wires, you have to look at the connectors from the cable end and if you read then the colors, they, of course are completely wrong, even if you read them from left to right. But this thought did not cross my mind until the next day. For the time being, I ripped the cable apart again, and rewired it according to what the support tech had told me. Of course, nothing worked. I called them back and after 5 min, the problem was diagnosed to be the cable length which has to be at least 12’ (mine was only about 20 inches). O.K. let's sleep another night.

Day 4:

Brought another, 15’cable (from Nick) and put on the last connectors in my possession and.... nothing, ...zero.. Finally I looked at the fax from SMC again and realized that, looking at the connector from the front (where you cannot see the wire colors) reverses the order of the colors, left becomes right and vice versa. OK, that's why the green LEDs were working the other day but the cable was too short. But, no more connectors left to rewire and there is no way to reuse them (I tried for 30 min to pull the contacts back out) ..... another night...

Day 5:

Plundered Nick's shop (at work) for the last RJ-45 connectors, and went back home to finally get things going. Made the cable, plugged them in and .... (curses here). Called SMC again and was taken step by step through the setup. Finally the guy tells me that I cannot run autoconfiguration because it would set me up at 100 MBIPS, instead, I would have to manually configure the cards to 10 MBIPS for a direct peer to peer connection. That's why you buy expensive, high quality cards (hehe)

Yahoooo. Two node test successfully performed. Now back to windows..... Unable to browse network. OK.. but at least something worked. Proud of myself, I decided to call it a day.

Day 6:

Today is Friday. So I have to get all support and backup pins and connectors before the weekend. Spent the entire evening trying to set up a windows network, alas, nothing works, I cannot even see my own computer in the network neighborhood.

During the next 10 days:

Meanwhile, in the technodrome (thanks go to my son for making me watch 3 years worth of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles") ..... my K6 machine was obviously not feeling too well, locking up, not shutting down correctly and so on, but that had already started before I installed the network card. In any case, I decided to do something good and, after reading many pages on Tom's and Anand's hardware guides as well as all the bad stuff about VXPro and TXPro chipsets on www.Carlind.com I got on the phone, bought a new mainboard, Shuttle HOT603 from Megatrends Technologies. Installation was kind of easy and guess what, all of a sudden I had a network. Only thing I still couldn't do was play Quake. Turned out that the protocol I was using (NetBEUI) cannot handle IPX applications (very interesting for someone like me who doesn't know shit about that stuff). Anyway, took me a few days to figure out that you need two separate protocols, one for playing and one for file, printer sharing. A big thanks goes to Paul who pointed me in the right direction (every day I learn something new, it is so exciting!!). Im retrospect, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble, had I gone to the Quake webpage first, they offer excellent instructions regarding setting up and configuring a LAN.

Weekend (day 19 or 20):

Quaking away. Cool stuff, only, I got no chance against my son... (hmmmm).

At some point I had to do my weekend shopping and dropped in at Staples where I bought a new keyboard drawer for my wave keyboard. OK, I got home, installed the drawer and ... the mouse was no longer there...???. After rebooting twice, the mouse (on my old Pentium 75) was back and I didn't think about it any more. Funny thing was though, that the machine was awfully slow and I had no idea why. But then it got faster again.

"Meanwhile.....

the evil Shredder"

.., no, my

wife

who is not evil at all, tried to scan in some of her art products to put on her web page when the machine (200 MHz K6) locked up. She rebooted, ... locked up again. I rebooted, ... locked up again.....We had dinner, then rebooted...... locked up again. Booted in safe mode...worked but useless. Rebooted ... everything is there and looks stable but as soon as I enter any windows program, the CPU usage (Norton Utilities) goes up to 100 % and after a while, everything freezes. Hmmmm?????

3:10 am:

couldn't sleep. I got up, started playing around with the puter .... took me one hour to be able to start it up and power it down again but finally it did it. I mean, I went into the setup, went to slower memory timing and so on ... but finally it looked like I was getting somewhere. OK, I have to admit also that I was running the machine at 208 MHz (83x2.5) which may have been responsible for the erratic behavior but I didn't want to rip everything apart at 4:30 am..

Next morning:

Lockup and lockup and lockup. I went back to 200 MHz and..... Lockup and lockup and lockup. Funny thing though was that it only happened in the windows environment. Well, maybe my windows was corrupted. Reinstalled Win95 and.... the startup screen tells me that my video card is bad or the drivers are incorrect (ATI 3D rage II). I tried to reinstall the drivers from the disk but .... Finally, I popped in my old trusty Trident 1MB video card and ... it worked again. Oh, BTW, did I mention that when removing the ATI card, I also took out the ethernet card.....

So, it just didn't leave me alone, I tried again with the ATI card and .. everything worked, no problems at all (but no Ethernet.....).

Monday:

I called SMC again and the guy actually tells me that the ethernet card needs a terminator because otherwise it would create error messages and, finally refers me to the web page of the IEEE. And I need to buy a hub which would solve my problems. ALL OF THIS IS PURE BALONEY. The real problem was that, when I installed the Keyboard Drawer, I must have touched the ethernet cable which now was kind of slanted in the jack (but on the PC that still worked). This caused error messages to be generated by NetBEUI which every 60 seconds searches for other parties on the LAN and then occupies 100 % CPU power (see chapter 2). So if you turn off one machine in a two node network, the other one will simply freeze within the next 60 seconds because the search signal is not returned and that's all it cares for. This Problem is intrinsic for NetBEUI, because it is supposed to do exactly what it does, to find other members of a LAN.

I have switched now to TCP/IP as ethernet protocol and that cured this particular malaise. I still cannot access the Internet with both machines at a time but I can Quake and print and do a number of other things which are pretty incredible. The other important thing is: No detail is unimportant. When my machine locked up, I should have checked whether the LEDs were on instead of running Norton Diagnostics.

Well, I hope, someone can learn from my mistakes (a rare event). Special thanks to Nick Pasquale & The Crew of Mount Sinai Academic Computing.

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