[nzlug] long wire: cat5 or phone?

[Mathew Carley]

Last I checked, it will fry the NIC if the phone rings (just a couple of 
volts too many).

At my first computer-shop job a back in 200x (I'm not *that* old), as 
on-board LAN became the norm, I made in intentionally and hopefully 
overly clear in the written documentation that I ended up writing (and 
in my explanation of said documentation when they were purchasing the 
machine) that people should not plug the phone line in to this port, and 
that the MODEM (if they were using dial-up) was further down on the 
case, and they should plug in to the socket with the square with the 
corners cut out, not the one with the icon of the phone... (I had 
photographic enlargements and everything... and some people still called 
us after they got home).

Yes, the documentation was aimed at normal humans - big bold red letters 
saying something like "PHONE LINE GOES HERE" etc...

Mathew


David Kirk wrote:
> <div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">Yuri,
>
>> The reason for keeping phone and ethernet on physically differently
>> shaped jacks is that I don't know what harm can come from connecting a
>> computer's ethernet port to an incoming phone line, or a fax machine
>> to an ethernet router. Also, the BT phonejack modules have the
>> capacitor thingy that makes phones work, and are telepermitted.
>
> You shouldn't be able to break anything if it is all wired correctly.
> Ethernet uses the first two pairs (1/2 and 3/6).  The phone should use
> the third pair (4/5).
>