Question Trying to set up a wired home network

[robert600]

Hi, can someone give me advice … answer questions about setting up a wired home network. I’m very unknowledgeable about networking so I’ll probably use the wrong terms for things. Is a wired network known as LAN?

Anyway, I’ve been using wireless networking (with virtually no understanding of it) for years and years but recent events (covid) have prompted me to look for quicker connections (home teaching with 19 students using TEAMS) .

So … I’ve been given a huge spool of Cat 5e cable, a bunch of end connectors and a crimper. I’ve made up a bunch of cables and am busy connecting things up. I’ve also picked up a second router and I believe I have it working as a repeater. How do I test that is actually sending out a wifi signal? … I know for sure directly connecting to the ports of this router works but I’m not positive it’s putting out a useable wifi signal. Right now they’re both sitting beside each other (5’ cable between the 2 routers) but of course I will be moving it to a more distant location once I’m convinced it’s working. Directly connecting to either of these routers has resulted in much better internet speeds and virtually all disconnection problems have disappeared when using TEAMS (wifi was a nightmare for this). So that’s good … I can now make a living at home lol.

Where I’m having trouble with is setting up a home network. My primary goal here is to be able to copy files from one laptop to another. I have 5 aging laptops to connect and a UHD Blu-ray player (presumably this list will grow). I’ve tried and tried to use the built in win10 networking but I just can’t get it to work … years ago I remember using workgroups but that seems to be gone now. Last night I got ‘pctrans’ and using this software I can now finally see the other laptops and transfer files. I’m not convinced I’m getting the best speeds however. I tested by transferring a large UHD movie file … it’s 19.41 GB … by wifi it took 1:02 to transfer … by LAN it took just under 33 minutes. Is that a reasonable LAN speed? It was sent from the D: drive (bog standard 5200 rpm 2 ½” laptop HDD) and to the D: drive of the receiving laptop (again a bog standard 5200 rpm 2 ½” laptop HDD). The sending laptop is plugged to the secondary router and the receiving laptop is connected to the primary router. Would it be better if both laptops were plugged into the primary router?

Anyway, I set the receiving laptop up to be a plex server … loaded up that big 4K video file, connected the UHD player to the LAN Network (primary router) , opened the Plex app on it and am playing the movie now … it seems perfect. I had tried this previously via wifi and I was getting lots of stuttering and audio-video desyncronisation. So that looks promising.

What hardware in a laptop is controlling the LAN connection … is it built into the little wifi card or is it more likely to be on the motherboard?

Any comments, suggestions, answers to my questions would be most welcome. Also is there a better software solution to networking than ‘pctrans’?

 

[USAFRet]

USB ethernet adapter is your only way forward.

Like this:
https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Foldable-Gigabit-Ethernet-Compatible/dp/B00YUU3KC6

 

[bill001g]

That is very strange. Used to be when everything was separate chips ethernet ports cost money now a lot of support is in the onboard chipsets. The physical ports and the few other components should not cost anything different for 100 or gigabit.

There must be some reason that they do this, you at least hope it is technical reasons and not some scam to get people to pay more money for a different model.

 

[robert600]

100mbit is still better than wifi at least

Yes ... it actually has changed the quality of my life. In these covid lockdown times, It's enabled me to work at home in comparatively spacious, quiet surroundings rather than going into the school board office ... setting up in a small spartan cubical they provide to me and a whole bunch of other teachers and trying to on-line teach from there ... not pleasant at all. The past few days working at home here has been sooooooooooo much better. So much so that even when this lockdown ends ... I might volunteer to stay on with on-line teaching - I expect that when it ends, they'll be a bunch of students/parents who will be very reluctant to return to classrooms. The board will have to accommadate them somehow ... maybe ...who knows? ... strange times we're living in ... adapt or perish lol.

 

[robert600]

Indeed HP Pavilion g6-2249wm? Sigh. No, then you are stuck in 100 Mbps. Sticknet (moving around files on USB 3.0 stick) will be faster large file moving option then.

Funny, but this recalled in memory a thing of past. In my old workplace circa 1995 there was a machine with 486 DX-40 CPU and very slow Maxtor IDE HDD. It was literally 3-4 times faster to work with files shared in network (10 Mbps Coaxial Ethernet) than put them on HDD and work locally.

Yes, I'm well used to tranfering movies back and forth via usb and really, it's not all that bad ... at least I can live with it. I tend to use external drives rather than sticks but the same idea. Usb 3 helps with that.

Funny what you say about the ide drives. How slow were they? My Dad tells me stories about using PCs back when they didn't even have hds. They would boot (MS DOS maybe) from these funny things called floppy disks (he still has some ... about five inches in diameter and yes they are very floppy). Typically a pc would have 2 floopy drives ... you'd put your boot disk in one and save your work, data to the other. I guess they held less than a Mb in storage! If a machine, had a hard drive it was considered very cutting edge lol. Maybe he's kidding me but he swears it's true. Of course, he also claims he used to walk 3 miles to school in blinding snowstorms every day ... I'm not buying that one! lol

 

[USAFRet]

Maybe he's kidding me but he swears it's true.

No, that is quite true.

And the first hard drive I did get...would take 3 of them to hold a single picture out of my current Fuji camera.

 

[robert600]

Then 100mbps is all you will ever get with that.

So much for my dreams of Plex and a NAS system. I'm a little disappointed but I'll live. Do you think those 'external usb to rj-45 gigabit ethernet adapter ' things would work? Something like this (maybe I should start a new post to see if anyone has had success with them):

https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matter...igabit+ethernet+adapter&qid=1611374438&sr=8-7

 

[USAFRet]

So much for my dreams of Plex and a NAS system. I'm a little disappointed but I'll live. Do you think those 'external usb to rj-45 gigabit ethernet adapter ' things would work? Something like this (maybe I should start a new post to see if anyone has had success with them):

https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matter...igabit+ethernet+adapter&qid=1611374438&sr=8-7

Yes, or the other one I linked above.

 

[Flayed]

Yes, I'm well used to tranfering movies back and forth via usb and really, it's not all that bad ... at least I can live with it. I tend to use external drives rather than sticks but the same idea. Usb 3 helps with that.

Funny what you say about the ide drives. How slow were they? My Dad tells me stories about using PCs back when they didn't even have hds. They would boot (MS DOS maybe) from these funny things called floppy disks (he still has some ... about five inches in diameter and yes they are very floppy). Typically a pc would have 2 floopy drives ... you'd put your boot disk in one and save your work, data to the other. I guess they held less than a Mb in storage! If a machine, had a hard drive it was considered very cutting edge lol. Maybe he's kidding me but he swears it's true. Of course, he also claims he used to walk 3 miles to school in blinding snowstorms every day ... I'm not buying that one! lol

Heh, my Dad has stories of programming a computer by punching holes in a card then waiting a day for it to run, finding it didn't work, and punching more holes. He is old though lol

 

[Krotow]

You can try USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter, yes. It indeed will be faster than internal 100 Mbps adapter.

Funny what you say about the ide drives. How slow were they? My Dad tells me stories about using PCs back when they didn't even have hds. They would boot (MS DOS maybe) from these funny things called floppy disks (he still has some ... about five inches in diameter and yes they are very floppy). Typically a pc would have 2 floopy drives ... you'd put your boot disk in one and save your work, data to the other. I guess they held less than a Mb in storage! If a machine, had a hard drive it was considered very cutting edge lol. Maybe he's kidding me but he swears it's true. Of course, he also claims he used to walk 3 miles to school in blinding snowstorms every day ... I'm not buying that one! lol

Your dad told a truth. Till early nineties HDD-s was exclusive and expensive. Like 300$ (yes, before inflation in 2000-ies) for 250 MB IDE/ATA hard drive at 1993. Earlier ones was even more expensive. Floppies was also my school time and first work years thing. Worked with them both - 5.25" and 3.5" flavours. 3.5" ones had larger capacity and better protection, so in some places they was used even a decade ago. I often hated them, because as any magnetic media they had a habit to correctly read only on device where they was written. Taking files on them somewhere only to discover them in non-readable condition at destination was normal thing. It was a nightmare in comparing with negligible USB stick glitches at today. Luckily I have nothing to do with them anymore so good riddance. Though because floppies had very wide usage base in specialized hardware worldwide, government and military organizations worldwide ditched them only recently. Some old industrial equipment like huge industrial CNCs still use them even at today.

That Maxtor HDD I mentioned was kinda exclusion. I don't know are it came from bad batch or simply was bad model. Even playing DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D from shared network drive was faster than from that HDD. Usual IO and data transfer in consumer IDE/ATA hard drives circa mid-nineties was 2-3 times faster than 10 Mbps network data transfer. It actually was one of IDE HDD selling point at that days - plus uniform interface for ALL HDDs at last.

 

[robert600]

Yes, or the other one I linked above.

Oh ... somehow I missed that post ... I see it now. I'll check it out. Ty

 

[robert600]

You can try USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter, yes. It indeed will be faster than internal 100 Mbps adapter.



Your dad told a truth. Till early nineties HDD-s was exclusive and expensive. Like 300$ (yes, before inflation in 2000-ies) for 250 MB IDE/ATA hard drive at 1993. Earlier ones was even more expensive. Floppies was also my school time and first work years thing. Worked with them both - 5.25" and 3.5" flavours. 3.5" ones had larger capacity and better protection, so in some places they was used even a decade ago. I often hated them, because as any magnetic media they had a habit to correctly read only on device where they was written. Taking files on them somewhere only to discover them in non-readable condition at destination was normal thing. It was a nightmare in comparing with negligible USB stick glitches at today. Luckily I have nothing to do with them anymore so good riddance. Though because floppies had very wide usage base in specialized hardware worldwide, government and military organizations worldwide ditched them only recently. Some old industrial equipment like huge industrial CNCs still use them even at today.

That Maxtor HDD I mentioned was kinda exclusion. I don't know are it came from bad batch or simply was bad model. Even playing DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D from shared network drive was faster than from that HDD. Usual IO and data transfer in consumer IDE/ATA hard drives circa mid-nineties was 2-3 times faster than 10 Mbps network data transfer. It actually was one of IDE HDD selling point at that days - plus uniform interface for ALL HDDs at last.

Funny to think about that now ... We've come a long way with storage and tranfer rates haven't we? Here I am fussing and fretting because I can't get gig speed to access my 14 TB external HD so I can stream 4k movie rips ... kinda puts it in perspective. I'm just thinking though, even with that old technology ... they were able to put folks on the moon and bring them back safe ... amazing really! Well ... unless you believe the conspiracy theories saying it was all a hoax lol.

 

[USAFRet]

Funny to think about that now ... We've come a long way with storage and tranfer rates haven't we? Here I am fussing and fretting because I can't get gig speed to access my 14 TB external HD so I can stream 4k movie rips ... kinda puts it in perspective. I'm just thinking though, even with that old technology ... they were able to put folks on the moon and bring them back safe ... amazing really! Well ... unless you believe the conspiracy theories saying it was all a hoax lol.

My current GPU has more memory space (8GB) than my first 10 PCs had hard drive space, combined.
My little NAS box over on the other side of the room has 50+TB directly addressable space.

 

[robert600]

Heh, my Dad has stories of programming a computer by punching holes in a card then waiting a day for it to run, finding it didn't work, and punching more holes. He is old though lol

Wow ... making holes in a card lol.

My Dad is getting up there in years too. He's still sharp but a lot quieter then he used to be. I miss his stories and perspective on things. I asked him about it a while back and he simply said "Its not that I don't care, I've just kinda run out of things to say".
One thing he would never, ever talk about was ... Vietnam. He'd only say "2 places you never want to be are ... in a war, or in a prison." He still gets real ansy on the rare occasions that helicopters fly over and he hears them way (like 30 seconds) before I do ... I like to think my hearing is pretty good. I have no idea what happened over there but it must have been bad ... like REAL BAD.

 

[Flayed]

Wow ... making holes in a card lol.

My Dad is getting up there in years too. He's still sharp but a lot quieter then he used to be. I miss his stories and perspective on things. I asked him about it a while back and he simply said "Its not that I don't care, I've just kinda run out of things to say".
One thing he would never, ever talk about was ... Vietnam. He'd only say "2 places you never want to be are ... in a war, or in a prison." He still gets real ansy on the rare occasions that helicopters fly over and he hears them way (like 30 seconds) before I do ... I like to think my hearing is pretty good. I have no idea what happened over there but it must have been bad ... like REAL BAD.

I bet it was bad. Luckily we haven't had a conscripted war here in the UK for a good long while.

 

[robert600]

I bet it was bad. Luckily we haven't had a conscripted war here in the UK for a good long while.

I'm guessing that the war and prison statement meant he was in both at the same time. Perhaps being held at a non-designated POW spot. Where, being fired on by 'friendly fire' was a distinct and maybe even frequent occurance. Helicopters ... Agent Orange ... Napalm. Gunfire was no issue whatsoever ... we'd often go duck hunting ... and dawn on opening day on a good duck lake is an absolute battlezone of gun fire. No problem at all. Get that distictive woop woop sound of a chopper in the air though and ... he'd be nervous as all git out and looking for cover ... like I said ... he'd hear the chopper way before I would.

The UK ... heavy lockdown there I've heard. My 1st teaching gig was in North Wales ... was there 8 years or so ... one of the world's best kept secrets is North Wales ... stunningly beautiful! I also miss those 9.99 return weekend flights out of John Lennon Airport to Paris ... Rome ...wherever. Ryan Air or Easy Jet. Bring back a couple of bottles of nice wine and what you save on that more than payed for the flights lol.

 

[Wolfshadw]

Heh, my Dad has stories of programming a computer by punching holes in a card then waiting a day for it to run, finding it didn't work, and punching more holes. He is old though lol

Back in the 80s, when I was going through technical training for my Air Force stint, our first course was Assembly language and yes, we actually used punch cards for the class. Ask your Dad how many "floor sorts" he did. 😀

-Wolf sends

 

[USAFRet]

Back in the 80s, when I was going through technical training for my Air Force stint, our first course was Assembly language and yes, we actually used punch cards for the class. Ask your Dad how many "floor sorts" he did. 😀

-Wolf sends

In my USAF crosstraining into computers (moving from aircraft) in the mid 90's, one of the first things we wrote in assembly was a roulette wheel simulator.
Why? Well...Biloxi, that's why.

 

[robert600]

Ok … another successful day of at home teaching … no problems whatsoever with connection issues so LAN (even at 100Mbps) has definitely been the fix. I had to go into the board office at the end of the day so I took the opportunity to pick up 2 of those usb 3:0 to 1GB LAN connector thingies. The local shop (curbside pickup only) was only a few $s more than Amazon.

I installed one on the sending laptop (couldn’t be easier … plug and play) and the other on the receiving laptop. I connected both laptops to the primary router (10/100/1000) using the short ‘factory cables’ both clearly marked Cat5e. Fired up ‘pctrans’ and copied over a semi-large file (sending and receiving from the D: drive of both laptops. I used task manager to check the speed while transferring and … it jiggled about a bit (is that normal?) from a high of about 665 Mbps to a low of 590 … my best guess is it was averaging about 635. That same window gives a bit of info about; cpu usage (jiggled about from 45% to 62% … mostly around 50%), ram (steady at 18%), HDD (jiggled about but somewhere around 68 %).

This obviously is WAY better (like 7 times quicker) than the 92 Mbps I was getting with the laptop’s built in LAN ports. Still … it’s a ways from 1000. I started wondering if maybe a bottleneck might be from using the D drive of both laptops. They both are the same in that they’re both bog standard laptop 5400 rpm HDDs connected via a caddy replacing the optical drive … my memory is that this is a SATA II interface. So, I copied a movie to the C: drive of the sending laptop (SSD … SATA III interface) and copied it over to the C: drive of the receiving laptop (likewise a SSD … SATA III interface). The speed of transfer was to all intents the same. I then connected both laptops to my much longer ‘home-crimped’ cables copied another movie over (D drive to D drive) … again the same speed. I then decided to give it a good test and copied my ‘Lord of the Rings Trilogy’ movies folder over. These are UHD rips (2160p, 4K, Dolby Atmos) and the 3 movies total 47.5 GB. As luck would have it, my phone rang just as the transfer started so I couldn’t use Task Manager to monitor. The transfer went well and ‘pctrans’ gives you a little log info on the files it has copied … in this case 47.52 GB in 11:17 minutes which I think is roughly in keeping with an average transfer rate of 635 or so … I can’t seem to do the math … BYTES to bits etc lol.

Anyway … that’s where I am. Obviously very pleased with the change but a bit puzzled by why it’s not closer to gig speed. Any thoughts about how to fine tune things to get that last 300 Mbps out of it? It’s not a huge deal to me … very, very happy with the 635 I’m getting … but if I can ‘tune it a bit higher’ (pun intended), I might as well.

Again … thank you all for the help! I think my next big step forward will be to sort out the secondary router … the guy who gave me the wires, connectors etc. also gave me a few routers … not knowing any better I just used the one that looked the prettiest. Now looking at them more critically and with more knowledgeable eyes, I see there is one with 10/100/1000 ports and an usb 3.0 port … a much better choice. I think it best to start a new thread for this upcoming adventure.

 

[Krotow]

Seems you now see the upper limit of data transfer in your laptop. It is a decade old model, I would stop bother about it anymore. Now you can copy files over network faster - we can consider it as success.

 

[bill001g]

It is likely the disk/file system. Look up the drive specs and how fast they can read and write. This is why using SSD rather than hard drives has become a standard.

To check just network performance use a program like IPERF on both ends. It should give you over 900mbps in most cases.

 

[robert600]

Seems you now see the upper limit of data transfer in your laptop. It is a decade old model, I would stop bother about it anymore. Now you can copy files over network faster - we can consider it as success.

Yes, I'm been wondering about the 'upper limit of these old laptops thing. I've been thinking it's either that or .... maybe those usb to Lan thingies .... despite calling themselves Gig, aren't quite up to full spec. Wherever this issue is ... I'm very happy with the results and definitely consider it to have been a worthwhile, successful project! It's easily good enough for me to work towards some sort of (probably PLEX server based) NAS storage system. That'll be months down the road but I feel like I now have the infrastructure in place to pull it off. In the meantime, to be able to quickly and easily transfer large movie files (without having to be plugging and unplugging usb external drives) is a HUGE bonus. My movie count is getting close to 1500 so ... I've got some tranferring to do lol. TY so much.

 

[robert600]

It is likely the disk/file system. Look up the drive specs and how fast they can read and write. This is why using SSD rather than hard drives has become a standard.

To check just network performance use a program like IPERF on both ends. It should give you over 900mbps in most cases.

Thinking of the disk/file system. That's eactly why I transferred a large movie to my c: drive SSD and then tranferred from this C: drive to the C: drive (also an SSD) of the receiving laptop. This resulted in virtually identical performance in terms of transfer rate compared to when I did D: drive to D: drive transfer. I don't know the exact specs of the SSDs (there're not top of the line EVOs) but ... they're plenty quick compared to the D: drive HDs!

I'll look into IPERF ... thanks!

 

[robert600]

I want to solicit some information about setting up secondary routers and networking but I’m hampered by a lack of knowledge about a lot of the terms associated with these topics.

Can I start by asking a few naïve questions?:

When talking about communicating with the outside world with a modem, router etc. … we use the term ‘INTERnet connection’ … is that correct?

On the other hand, if I want to talk about using the router to connect 2 computers together so they can share files etc. … how do I refer to this … would this be a ‘INTRAnet connection’? or if I said ‘home network’ would that be what I’m talking about? … or is there a better word?

Whichever is the case for the above … am I right in thinking that such INTRANET connections would work just fine even if the INTERNET connection coming into the house from the provider was down?

I understand my computers can ‘talk’ to the router in 2 ways. Until recently, I’ve been only doing it via Wifi so that seems clear. Recently, I‘ve switched over to the ‘hard wired’ way, the ports seem to be referred to as LAN ports … so if I say I have a LAN connection … does that tell everyone I’m using the hard-wired way of connecting or … is there a better term to use?

Ok … My laptop is hard-wired to my router. The wifi is also on, does the laptop (I’m using Win 10 if that matters) automatically select the wired (LAN?) connection as the one to use or does it use both or does it use wifi? Right now, I have the wifi switched off, so I know I’m using the LAN connection but is this advisable or necessary?

Whether connected by wifi or LAN … is the password to the network the same? It seems like it is since it didn’t ask me for a new password when I switched over to LAN. Is this something that can likely be changed in the router settings? Allowing me to give someone the wifi password without allowing them LAN access (or vice versa I suppose)?

When you have a secondary router hooked up ... is there a simple way to verify that it's actually sending out a wifi signal?



OK … help with these questions would be greatly appreciated … then I can get into what I really want to ask about without sounding like a complete idiot … maybe lol.

 

[USAFRet]

On the other hand, if I want to talk about using the router to connect 2 computers together so they can share files etc. … how do I refer to this … would this be a ‘INTRAnet connection’? or if I said ‘home network’ would that be what I’m talking about? … or is there a better word?

The term you're seeking is LAN.
Local Area Network.

WiFi wants a password. To prevent your neighbor from trivially )or accidentally) connecting to your router.
Wired ethernet does not.

Windows almost always connects to the faster connection. Unless there are major issues, that will be the ethernet.

 

[kerberos_20]

When talking about communicating with the outside world with a modem, router etc. … we use the term ‘INTERnet connection’ … is that correct?

not really, connecting outside is called WAN connection (wide area connection)

On the other hand, if I want to talk about using the router to connect 2 computers together so they can share files etc. … how do I refer to this … would this be a ‘INTRAnet connection’? or if I said ‘home network’ would that be what I’m talking about? … or is there a better word?

that would be called LAN (local area network)

I understand my computers can ‘talk’ to the router in 2 ways. Until recently, I’ve been only doing it via Wifi so that seems clear. Recently, I‘ve switched over to the ‘hard wired’ way, the ports seem to be referred to as LAN ports … so if I say I have a LAN connection … does that tell everyone I’m using the hard-wired way of connecting or … is there a better term to use?

connecting to router/modem is either with wired connection or wireless, doesnt really matter which terms u use if other recognize wires from air from it

Whether connected by wifi or LAN … is the password to the network the same? It seems like it is since it didn’t ask me for a new password when I switched over to LAN. Is this something that can likely be changed in the router settings? Allowing me to give someone the wifi password without allowing them LAN access (or vice versa I suppose)?

lan doesnt need wifi password

When you have a secondary router hooked up ... is there a simple way to verify that it's actually sending out a wifi signal?

u can open router sertting by typing its ip adress in web browser to check its wifi settings if its enabled, wifi name/passwords/connected clients

internet itself is comunication between different computers on huge wan network
intranet is is same as internet, but its usualy used in corporate areas to limit access to only few servers (firewall block)