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Better leave that alone ... the IT Admin at work has qthing passworded and nothing can be changed unlwss he does it... He is willing to have her bring in anything she wants loaded and does it for her.
A technique I have used in the past is to give the network at home the same IP range as that at work. Alternatively you could look for the LMHOSTS file on the XP machine, put a route to your network in there and then just connect to the network and try connecting to your Linux machine. Getting internet access through this methid may be a bit trickier, but it also worked when I did it at home, I did it by using an internet proxy server and changing the IE6 settings for the proxy server back and forth. If the IE6 settings can't be changed you could give the network card on the linux machine an IP address the same as the proxy at work. If you use the IP range from the work laptop and it's not a private one remember to make sure that it is not visible on the internet (needs to be behind a router or your linux box doing NAT for it). <SNIP>
The extra wires in the boxes are not connected to anything... only the blue/white pair are used to provide phone connections. The orange/white - green/white and brown/white are unused and not connected to anything... just part aof the cable that runs from box to box...
You should avoid mixing telephone and network wiring. Telephone wires carry anything upto about 50 volts DC which will fry anything that you connect it to on your computer (by mistake, but plan for it to happen!). Also, even though they are insulated the wires do communicate with each other because of the electro-magnetic field around them. Even in wires carrying a relatively low voltage this can be a problem, which is why the specification for Cat5 is so stringent compared with telephone cables. If you add the telephone voltages to the mix you will almost certainly cause you network problems, but you could also cause problems on the telephone that may affect the quality of dial-up internet access. Hope this helps Damon