kingston kne-100tx vs. @home lancity cable modem

Robert G. Brown rgb@phy.duke.edu
Wed Nov 4 19:00:51 1998


On Wed, 4 Nov 1998, Ray Lehtiniemi wrote:

> 
> hi all
> 
> i'm having grief with my kingston 10/100 NIC and my new cable modem
> service.  no matter what i do, the tulip driver (newest version, built
> as a module for my redhat 5.1 2.0.35 kernel) tells me there's no link
> beat.
> 
> rogers (the cable company) swears up and down that my modem is happy
> and they can ping it, so the problem appears to be the UTP link from
> NIC to modem.

One thing that didn't occur to me (although I should have known better)
when I was contemplating my own home ADSL NIC-Modem connection -- The
cable required is a crossover cable.  Think about it -- when connecting
to a hub you are transmitting on the transmit line and the transmission
is repeated on all the other links.  When connecting to the cable modem,
the transmit line of YOUR NIC cannot be connected to the transmit line
of the cable modem interface as it would be with a straight through
line.  It is just like connecting two NIC's directly.

If you plug both interfaces into a hub with straight-through cables
things should work.  Alternatively, if you swap your existing
straight-through cable-modem-to-NIC cable with a crossover, I'll bet
things work.

   Hope so, anyway -- good luck,

     rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb@phy.duke.edu