I remember running a lan cable between my house and my friend's house. We shared a 8m high back wall covered in creepers, but we had some old neighbours between us that would never allow us to climb the wall to run a cable. Neither did our parents. We waited for our next door neighbours to go on holiday.
So I tied a long string to a cricket ball (drilled a hole all the way through) and chucked it along the length of the wall. It was covered in creepers so we managed to tie a cat5 cable to it and pull it high along the wall through the thick plants without anyone finding out for over a decade. Took about 10 throws before we were happy that the path along the top of the wall was not visible. my Dad noticed, but he understood what we were doing, so he kept the secret from my mom.
Its how I learned to do networking. We started with IPX/SPX networking initially, but eventually graduated to IP4. The 10mbit 3com network cards cost a small fortune back then compared to coax, but it was the best way to do cable runs that long. Windows 3.1 networking was also a pain back then and game support was mainly built around dial-up modems, but phone calls were expensive and we did not want to spend all our pocket money on Telkom (this was before callmore time)
We played so much Warcraft 1 and Falcon 3.0 over that link. All arranged over Winchat.
