Hello everyone:

We had some major renovations in our school's library over the summer, and right now, I'm rewiring everything for computer. Everything has been fine until I ran into a problem this morning, and for the life of me, a solution is not coming to my mind, because I'm not sure what the problem is. Here's the situation:

1. Cat5 cable begins in the basement via patch panel, and goes up to the library.

2. I terminated the cable and put a data jack on the end of it, then mounted it in a surface mount box.

3. When I plug a straight-through cat5 cable into the jack, everything works great - can brose the Internet, an IP is assigned via DHCP, etc. This tells me that the jack is working fine.

4. The next step was to take a straight-through cable with one end in the jack, and plug the other end into a Dell PowerEdge 2324 24-port switch. I have a light showing link and status.

5. When I try to plug a PC into any port on the switch, it can't find the DHCP server, and I get the "limited or no connectivity message".

6. I also tried a Linksys 16-port workgroup switch (I know that this one works for sure), and got the same results.

7. I know that a crossover cable would provide no help here, but for grins, I made one and tried that on both switches as well - no dice.

What on earth am I missing here? I did this very same thing in a few offices, and everything went as expected; am not sure why this is causing problems. Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time!

-Michael/AdemcoWisc