Question : Network nightmare; cable lengths, DHCP and Linksys WRT-54G routers

Hi all,
This is the second part of a nightmare scenario at a client's home site that's had me bamboozled for 4 days straight. I am trying to get net connectivity in a house and detached workshop. The original plan was router in each building. After solving subnet issues I test-ran the two routers in my shop without incident. When I went to the client's home this morning it was a different story.

1st problem: Cable length seems to be a major issue. There's a 50' conduit between the shop and the house, and another 40 or so feet from the end of the conduit to the original location of the router. Using plenum-grade Cat 5e, rated for 100m/328' I figured no problem. Nope. We tried 5 different runs, three different routers. Nothing over about 50' works reliably, and nothing over 60' works at all.

I then relocated the router closer to the conduit, but having a 50' conduit run and a 40' cable-modem-to-router run is still causing problems. I finally moved the cable modem right beside the router(to the base of the conduit), and trimmed the conduit run of cable to as short as possible. This permitted my IBM T-40 to pull a DHCP address from the WRT54G. However, the second router in the shop couldn't pull an address, nor would a static address work (I want the 2nd router to have a fixed IP, of course). This leads to the 2nd issue:

2nd problem: ONLY the T40 could draw an address from the DHCP server. A brand-new HP box, a freshly-rebuilt Dell and a Compaq laptop can't get DHCP addresses.

Are there known-problems with cable lengths and/or signal strengths with the WRT54g? Is my belief that 50' should be nothing in terms of distance for Cat 5e Ethernet cabling?

The House router is setup WAN DHCP from the cable modem and 192.168.1.x subnet on the LAN side. DHCP is enabled, with a scope of 50 IPs to choose from. I had tried the other WRT54g in the shop (and also a Netgear 614) on 192.168.1.254 on the WAN side and 192.168.2.x on the LAN side, but nothing doing. Plugging the cable from the conduit directly into my T40 works. Plugging in into any of the other three machines in the shop, none of them work.

Please, HELP!!!
Thanks!

Answer : Network nightmare; cable lengths, DHCP and Linksys WRT-54G routers

BAD - you want to use T568B standard wiring.  The twists in the cable can make a difference in performance.  In fact, that is one aspect of the Category of the cable - the number of twists in a given length.  nip the ends on those cables and put new ones on according to the T568B spec and try again, I suspect it will work - at least work better.