Setting up a 2 Man Win Lan
Stuff needed:
2 computers (Should go without saying but you never know with somepeople)
2 Network Cards (Installed into your computers)
Cable
To set up a LAN with a mate for whatever reason ... **COUGH** cs **COUGH** ... you do not need to go through the hassle of hubs, switches and miles of cable.
Usually you would connect both PC's to a Hub or a switch, but as these burn away a fair wedge of your hard earnt cash we are going to create a cross-over cable. This is basically a normal network cable (RJ45) wired differently to allow 2 PC's to connect straight to each other.
Creating the cable
1) You Will Need: Cable Stripers
Get a piece of CAT 5 cable long enough to reach between the two PC's. Strip about 1 inch off the end of the wire to reveal 8 more wires. These wires will all be color coded as follows.
O - Orange
WO - White and Orange
G - Green
WG - White and Green
B - Blue
WB - White and Blue
Br - Brown
WBr - White and brown
2) You will Need: Wire Cutters, RJ$% connecter
You need to order the wires in the following combination - WO,O,WG,B,WB,G,WBr,Br
Once you have them in order cut them so they are about 3/4 of an inch long and slide them into the RJ45 plug with the clip facing away from you
3) You will need : Crimper
Make sure the wires are all the way in to the top of the RJ45 connector and that they are in the right order and put the connector into the crimpers and crimp it.
4)
Repeat these steps for the other end of the wire but with the wires in the following order
WG,G,WO,B,WB,O,WBr,Br
In this order all you have done is swapped the green and white green wires with the orange and white orange wires.
Once you have done this you can plug the wire into the two computers network cards.
5)
The last thing you need to do is to configure your PC's to talk to one another. Right click on your network neighbourhood or my network places in XP and select properties. This should bring up your network properties.
The client for networks is self explanatory, file and printer sharing is need if you want to swap files between computers. TCP/IP is the communication protocol they will be using to talk to each other. Now we need to assign IP addresses to the PC's. You do this by selecting TCP/IP and clicking properties.
Because there are 2 computers we will need 2 IP addresses, we will use 192.168.0.1 & 192.168.0.2 both having a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0, simple enter the numbers in the boxes, click ok and then ok again. After a quick restart you should be ready to rumble.
