Can i connect 2 pcs with direct lan cable ?

[grafx1]

Can i connect 2 pcs with direct lan cable ? one of them may be has a gigabit integrated lan which i had read it may support auto sense which make automatic cross over..

or is there any harm if they were not support auto sense as i'm not sure.

Thank you for support.

[puntoMX]

Yes you can, it´s called a cross-wire UTP RJ-45 cable.

[eyeball]

if they both auto-sense though, he would be ok with a straight through cable

you will need to set a static address on each pc for it to work, or you could let XP just use its own automatic private ip addressing scheme

[grafx1]

but i'm not sure of auto sense, so is there any harm connecting with "direct" cable not "cross over" cable ?

Edited December 3, 2007 by grafx1

[grafx1]

OK thanks, it worked, one of them has auto sense.

[Ponch]

I'm curious here. Can you please report your findings (if one is a gigabit). If not... hubs are cheap, cross cables even cheaper. As for your hesitation, it surely won't arm trying.

[nmX.Memnoch]

Just for everyone's information...

For a NIC or switch to follow the GigE standard it must support auto-crossover. That means you can use a straight through cable and the port is supposed to auto-configure itself to crossover (if it's a NIC-to-NIC or switch-to-switch connection). I'm using that exact configuration on a high-end cluster system at work. Windows Clustering "requires"* a second NIC in each server for a heartbeat connection. In a 2-node cluster you can just do a NIC-to-NIC connection for the heartbeat. If they're GigE NICs then you can just use a straight-through cable for that connection.

*You can get away with not having the heartbeat connection, but it's not recommended.

Edited December 5, 2007 by nmX.Memnoch