I remember playing over a 9-pin RS232 null cable - but I guess that is telling about my age :D

Not Warcraft though - some ancient DOS game.

For anyone today who's got copper wire stretched between any buildings, you are in danger and your configuration is quite unwise.

For every standalone building that has a ground, that building also has an electrical potential. This potential is not necessarily the same between two neighboring buildings. When you stretch a copper line between them, you are tempting fate, electrically, not to mention the dangers of lightning strikes and the elements attacking that connection.

It is generally recognized that fiber optics are not only very efficient and durable, but also impervious to electrical troubles of the type that may plague inter-building connections. Simply grab switches or routers that support at least one fiber-optic connection, and link up!

As the article says,

> Removable storage is quite slow unless you are willing to spend a lot of money.

An SSD good enough to copy tens of GB quickly is not cheap.

Back in the day you needed a modified cable for this with RX/TX swapped on one end but nowadays probably all nic chips have auto-detect so you can take a normal patch cable and do it.

The way I learned this, is that patch cables use stranded wires, but ethernet cables use solid wires.

IIRC crossovers are pre-2000, yes. "Fast Ethernet" or 100Base-T adapters usually could talk over straight link.

edit: as for length, it depends. you won't get a gigabit over 150m of crap cat3, but you will get a link, even if it's 10 half-duplex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Aut... is what allowed the switchover to happen automatically, and it got folded into the 1000BASE-T standard. So yes, crossover cables are no longer required because the two Ethernet adapters at either end can negotiate between them to have one of them "flip" the meaning of its Receive (RX) and Transmit (TX) pins.

That's exactly what a patch cable is. /facepalm

Back in my college days, 169.254.x.y addresses were the bane of my existence, because my job was getting students' computers set up with the brand-new Ethernet connection in their dorm room. This usually required a tech to come out to their room and configure Windows 95 properly, with IP and DHCP instead of Novell Netware and IPX (I don't remember why Netware/IPX was the default on so many Windows 95 installs, but that was definitely what I found most often when I went to look at someone's computer that "wasn't connecting to the Internet".)

Occasionally we had someone who knew what they were doing and had their Windows 95 settings set up correctly, and then all we had to do was activate their room's Ethernet port and add their MAC address to the DHCP server's list of authorized MACs. But most often I or one of the other techs had to head down to the person's dorm room and set up their computer's network settings correctly before it would work. Once the 169.254 address was replaced by 192.168, my job was finally done. But there were times when that took some doing.

That wasn't that long ago was it..?

/looks longingly out the window, and catch my aging face in the reflection