skeletonbow: If they have gigabit network hardware in them it's practically a guarantee, but if they have 100Mbit hardware it depends on how old they are and whether they included that functionality or not. No sense buying or making a crosslink cable if it isn't needed though if one has a straight cable to use and it works. :) If I'm not mistaken I believe only one end of the cable needs to autodetect and adjust though, but I'd have to read up on that to be absolutely sure.
I was one of the last holdouts I knew to move away from 10base2... even after I had a modern network I still had one LAN segment running 10base2 off of it to ISA network cards in 486s while everyone made fun of me. :) Since those days of yore though I've gotten with the program. :)
As I understand it: Ethernet (
cat-5) is made up of 8 wires, 4 of which are grounds. 2 are for data and 2 are for timing. Pairs of the data/timing are put together to make input and output pair. To make a crossover cable you simply have to swap the 4 wires around on one end, if you do both ends you end up with a regular ethernet cable that doesn't follow a specific standard and can't be modified/fixed later easily should they need to do that.
As for your network, let them laugh, you're using hardware that's still good :P I have my ethernet cables duct-taped to the carpet rather than drilling holes in the walls...
I've actually gotten away with making super cheap ethernet cables using phone wire (
6 wires) instead of official cat5 (
8 wires), but not it's not recommended.