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"Home Networking Problem."

Here's a strange one for all you lot out there.

I have just re-wired the house with Cat5e network cable, with points in rooms where needed. The ADSL router (4-port 10/100) is now in the loft.

I plugged in my PC using my onboard gigabit adapter, and everything works fine - I can access the internet through the router, it assigns my IP dynamically, the works. I tried that on every socket and it's all fine.

However, none of our other PCs will work on the network. Similarly, my computer won't connect if I use my 10/100 network card rather than the onboard gigabit. They simply seem to hang at the "acquiring network address" stage, then return a status of "Limited or no connectivity". They cannot ping other machines on the network or anything.

If I assign the IPs manaully, they say connected, but can't indeed connect to anything - they can't access the router, they can't ping, etc.

Does anyone have any ideas why they don't work? This is fairly urgent!

Not quite. I had wired the plugs as I thought they were wired in the sockets:

1. Orange/White
2. Orange
3. Blue/White
4. Blue
5. Green/White
6. Green
7. Brown/White
8. Brown

Obviously the arrangement of terminals doesn't correspond to the arrangement of pins. Ooops! Ah well, it all works now. It was just odd that my Gigabit could handle anything. I must have had about 3 different combinations of wires, and it always worked.

I'm guessing the gigabit card was autosensing, so it wouldn't matter that you appear to be using a cross over cable with it. What you posted as regards the wires is correct for a straight through cable and for one end of a cross over cable. The other end of a crossover cable should go:

1. Green/White
2. Green
3. Orange/White
4. Blue
5. Blue/White
6. Orange
7. Brown/White
8. Brown

I'm guessing at least some of your cables had this end on them.

Erm, the exact same thing happened to me yesterday without doing anything??

I hate computers

Right, sorted.

It turns out I had wired the plugs incorrectly. I had foolishly wired the plugs the same as the sockets - you'd think that'd be sensible wouldn't you?!

But alas no. So, for future reference, if anyone ever wishes to put an RJ45 plug on the end of a network cable, it goes as follows:

1: Orange/White
2: Orange
3: Green/White
4: Blue
5: Blue/White
6: Green
7: Brown/White
8: Brown

Oh the joy.

I think I've found the problem.

I wired according to the colour codes in the sockets, but all my prebought cables and guides online are subtly different.

My Gigabit thing seems immune though - I'm sending this with some random jumble of correct and incorrect. The wires even swap over half along!

To Tomoose - I wired all the cables, and I know they're all wired as straight-through, just wired wrong :) Lol

Is there any chance you bought cross-wired stuff and its confusing the router? Probably not.

Sorry don't know the ins and outs of gigabit vs ethernet, but we seem to have proved your cabling's duff ;¬)

Time to re-do some work me thinks...

We don't have a laptop! D'oh! However we do have a nice long patch lead. Yay!

Just plugged that in direct from the PC to the router and it works fine.

So the question is, what is wrong with the cabling/sockets that means that only my onboard gigabit ethernet will work, and none of the others will?

I suggest you connect a pc to the router using an original cable (might have to move a pc in to the loft! Hopefully you've got a laptop...) to prove if the problem lies with your new cables/connections or not.

Event Viewer has nothing useful - only says that a network cable was plugged in, and it was assigned the IP address 169.xxx.xxx.xxx (i.e. Window's default "i'm gonna make up my own IP address").

The NIC diagnostic tools show that no packets can be received - it's just not communicating with the router.

ping 127.0.0.1 works fine though, so I know the stack is working OK.