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INSTRUCTIONS FOR SLICING YOUR FINGERS AND POKING HOLES IN YOUR HANDS
Basically for wired [Ethernet] networks, you want cat5 cabling, and you will use RJ45 jacks and plugs [the little 8 pin jobs that look like their RJ11 telephone jack cousins]. You can go to Home Depot or Radio Shack and get a lot of this stuff. It is 4 pair stuff in general (8 wires arranged in 4 twisted pairs). I have seen it usually go for 10 cents a foot. Can get kinda expensive. So shop around. You will NOT need more than the two pair for 10 or 100 Mb/s ethernet networking, unless you may be thinking of more complicated networks, or running two locations in one cable, so you can actually order 2 pair cable which will work just fine for 10baseT and 100baseT and may cost a lot less per foot. For "GigE," or "GE" you will need all 4 pair in the cable!!
Also, I am a little peeved in that you cannot buy cat5 wall plates and RJ45 jacks at very many places, and those that I have seen are priced outrageously. They should start showing up just like all the phone line RJ11wall plates and jacks, where they can be gotten fairly cheaply. I suggest you do some searching on-line and buy in bulk: 2 pair cables and RJ45 jacks and wall plates and RJ45 plugs. I need to find a few sites....
Or you can just do like I did in several rooms and drill a hole in the floor and connectorize the cable that you pull through! I'm not gonna pay outrageous prices for those walls plates, I don't care what my wife says about how it looks [luckily she doesn't read this..... :-)]!
The hardest part about doing the ethernet cabling is adding (crimping) the plug! If you are color blind like me, then it is almost impossible to get all 8 wires oriented correctly [and you must also be careful to get one pair on pins 3 and 6]. You have to watch which colors and pairs go in which holes, because you have to replicate this at the other end! That is why I normally work with 2 pair cables - 4 wires. Getting 4 wires lined up and in the right holes is much easier than doing all 8 wires. 10baseT and 100baseT Ethernet only uses two pairs, but they are two very specific pairs!.
Just remember pins 1,2 are a pair and pins 3,6 are a pair. You connect 1,2 on one end to 1,2 on the other end [using one of the twisted pairs ...doh...] for a straight through cable, which is the normal cable [and 3,6 to 3,6 of course... doh!...]. You may need to occasionally make "crossover" cables. Just connect 1,2 to 3,6 on the other end. To find pin 1 on the plug, just hold it with the little locking tab down in the left hand [the thing that always gets stuck when you try to pull that cable off], and the copper connects facing toward you. Pin 1 is on the left. And don't buy one of those cheap $4 plastic crimpers! It would also be nice if you had an ohmmeter to check your connections, but just make sure you get a good crimper, and you look very closely at your connections after you make them. Or call me and I can crimp all your cables. I'm cheap. This is easy work! Go here for some diagrams.
CAUTION: If you will be doing GE cabling, you will need all 4 pairs in the cable to be wired. Yes, that's right, there is a very complicated layer 1 encoding scheme to keep the bit rate down on the wire - this is how you get 1GB, by NOT running the wires at 1 GHZ!!
This site has a nice discussion of physically wiring your house.