I originally posted on NetworkEngineering, but told it wasn't the right place, and I should try posting over here, so here we go. Hopefully I got the right place this time :D
I was recently making a really quick-and-dirty cross-over ethernet cable for playing a game with somebody (I used scissors, cut the cable open, then twisted the orange-white with the green-white, and the orange with the green, scotch taped the twists together to prevent shorts, and said good enough; I don't have my crimper not end jacks with me). This is great for person-to-person like what I needed, but it made me think if I wanted more than two people.
I know since the RX and TX lines are crosses I wouldn't be able to create a private network, but that's not what I want to do. Let's say all I had with me was some ethernet cables, scissors, tape, the devices I wanted to connect (like my situation today), but I also now have a RaspberryPi.
If I were to have the cables not cross between the two computers, and only cross it right before connecting it to the RaspberryPi, in theory both of these 'slave' devices should be able to communicate with the Pi, and thankfully IPv4 handles collisions. Thus, my theory is if I just use the Pi as pretty much a parrot box, I should be able to solve this. The slave clients should ignore the packets not designated for them, and since I copied the TX line back over to the RX line, the other slave should now receive the message.
I admit, this is a horrible idea. There'd almost definitively be many packet failures, and since each packets needs parroted over from TX to RX, there'd be less bandwidth available. However, my question isn't "Should any sane person do this ever?" it's, is what I'm saying possible, at least in theory. If really all I had was a hand full of ethernet cables to splice together, and my Pi (which is tiny and can even be battery powered, so I almost always have it), could I create a small lan-party system like this?
