So you want to make a etherkiller. You might whonder "What's the optimal etherkiller design?". It depends. A quite common design is to wire Live Phases to the RX and TX pins. If you have three-phase power available, the following scheme[1] should work:
Live phase 1 <--> RJ45 pin 3 Live phase 2 <--> RJ45 pin 6 Live phase 3 <--> RJ45 pin 2 Neutral <--> RJ45 pin 1 GND <--> RJ45 pin 8
If you don't have 3-phase power available, this is not the thing for you. After all, it might be a bit overkill... Simply Live phase 1 for both RX-pins and Live phase 2 for TX-pins works just great. The following should work:
Live phase 1 <--> RJ45 pin 3 Live phase 1 <--> RJ45 pin 1 Live phase 2 <--> RJ45 pin 2 Live phase 2 <--> RJ45 pin 6 GND <--> Unused pins
If you've got a ground fault circuit breaker you might consider not connecting the ground pins, since this can trip the ground fault detector, and simply power of the mains. And that's not wanted, is it? After all, a etherkiller should kill!
One of the problems with such etherkillers is that 230V can sometimes strike through the insulation of CAT5-cables, so extra care must be taken in choosing good cable. Myself, I've opted for a far simpler design that works just fine: half of the pins to L1, half of the pins to L2, using a normal mains cord.
If you're of the adventorus kind, you could certainly try a more refined ethernet killer, using pulsed DC instead of 230VAC. I guess this should do more damage, as short pulses will...ahem...have better effect on the chips inside the NIC.
If you've got a fiber based network, etherkillers needs more consideration. A short length of fiber with a suitable connector with a 2-3W LASER diode might be able to zap it. I've not heard about real world tests with fiber optic etherkillers yet. Any experiences with fiber optic killers is welcome! I'll let you know if I hear of any useable designs.
[1] - Generously lifted from BOFHcam.org's description.
(C) etherkiller.org 2008
