Line Interference?

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 Question by Matt Dees posted 20 Jun 2004
 Line Interference?
after decided that 802.11b will not work for any sort of media or entertainment uses, I've decided to run cat5e in my house, and now I'm experiancing line interference for an unexplainable reason.

I have taken the following steps to avoid interference, or to diagnosis the problem:

1.) I ran the wires in my attic hanging from the roof to avoid and EMI. at no point does it come within 5ft of any power lines.
2.) Dropped the wires via plastic conduits (on the outside of the walls)
3.) The cable's conintuity has been tested as fine
4.) All the patch cables are brand new and tested (and work on other set ups).
5.)The terminals are correctly set up and test green.
6.) my NIC has been configured for my network (no DHCP)
7.) I have attempted to connect multiple machines, none have worked, and when attempting to ping (on any of said machines) the router, I get request timed out.
8.) when using a home made tester that basically just connects the twisted pairs, the router acts no different then as if it were connected to a NIC (fast blinking activity light, regardless whether the connected machine is on or off)

please, I have spent two days trying to figure this out, and I'm at a complete lost, is there any advice you can give me that will help me fix this problem?
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 Answer by Dmitri Abaimov posted 22 Jun 2004
Dear Matt,

My help won't probably do much to ease your pain, but I would suggest couple things:
If you are sure the cables tested OK for continuity ALL THE WAY THROUGH, with patch cords connected at both ends, and also none of the components appear to be damaged, do not waste your time tracing mysterious EMI because the problem most likely lies in the Windows network setup. I would advise to enable that DHCP server on the router, and let the machine figure the connection out.

I'm not sure about your home made tester. What's it do? The blinking activity may very well be an indication of a hardware problem, but you should check that in the router's manual.

In a normal residential environment EMI sources are either absent or negligibly weak, so, again, don't waste your time on EMI.

Sincerely,
Dmitri Abaimov, RCDD

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