Need help with ethernet cabling!

[Con]

Can you guys explain what patch, crossover, and straight-thru cables are and where I need to use them? I've never payed any attention to that in the past but noticed no problems. I need to put all the ends on our cat5e and cat6 cables in our new house, but I know there are different orders you can put the wires in before crimping. We've got a modem in the garage, and from the garage there's cat5e and cat6 going out to all the rooms (a pair in the extra cat5e can be used for a phone line if needed). So I'm thinking connect the modem to a router also in the garage, but idk what to do from there. There are more cables going to the garage than can plug into the router and I'm thinking a hub/switch (difference?) is needed here. IDK shit about networking, halp :(

[Cortexian]

Crossover is only if you want to connect two similar devices, a crossover cable is required to directly connect two PC's together.

Patch cable (aka Straight-Through, it's the same thing) is what you want, it's the stuff that connects two dissimilar devices such as a router and PC, modem and PC, or modem and router. You shouldn't need to worry about crossover at all when wiring a house since all the rooms should be going to a central router which then connects to the internet.

The ideal setup is below:
..Modem
.......|
...Router
.......|
Computers

The modem is almost always provided by your ISP. I suggest you get a good switch, especially if the router you currently have isn't going to have enough ports. If you want Gigabit I suggest this one (http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=337), if not then grab this one (http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=71), they also have 8-port switches if that's all you want. If you find that the switches are to pricey you can daisy-chain routers together most of the time, but it will be harder to configure and port-forward and such.

When using a switch the above chart looks like the following:
..Modem
.......|
...Router
.......|
...Switch
.......|
Computers

Remember that the switch will take up one port on your router and one port on itself, however you just turned that port you used up into however remaining ports are available on the switch.

[Con]

Ah, okay that helps. I also see there's two ways I can make the ends: 568A and 568B. After some reading I learned A is newer and you're supposed to use it but most cables are B anyway. Are devices capable of handling both automatically?

[Syuusuke]

When in doubt
just plug it

[Phopojijo]

Basically... there are some (Edit For Clarity) cables wires in a cable that are transmit, and some are receive. If you connect a straight-through cable... pins for transmit will be connected to pins for transmit and pins for receive will be connected to pins for receive.

In a conversation -- that would be like linking two people's mouths together and two people's ears together. No communication happens because a mouth can't hear and an ear can't talk.

A crossover cable connects transmit to receive and receive to transmit... so the mouths aren't connected and the ears aren't connected... but one mouth is connected to one ear and the other mouth is connected to the other ear. But you run into problems if one of the sides already is internally crossed over -- unfixing your fix.

That said -- a LOT of ethernet controllers -- especially on routers -- autodetect and switches if it detects two transmits are connected together and two receives are connected together... so it really doesn't matter all too much anymore.

[Cojafoji]

Don't use crossover cables unless you're doing a straight link between two computers (nothing like a fast xfer (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/Connect-two-computers-using-a-crossover-cable)), though like senor phopo said, a lot of controllers now a days have no problem using them interchangeably with normally wired cabling.