making patch cables
As any of you who’ve tried it know, it’s not that hard, though it did take a little trial and error to teach myself based on web howto’s. I ended up referring to this, this and this.
Why bother? It really is much nicer when your cables are the right length, so you don’t have unruly spools of unneeded cable everywhere. After a recent rewire, my server closet was a real cabling disaster. Also, it’s way more cost effective if you’re talking lots of cables.
Lessons:
- you don’t really need a cable tester. At least the simple kind I got wasn’t even that helpful — it gave a passing score to a cable that wouldn’t reliably work. Just plug it into your network & see if it transfers a big file properly. (If I’m missing something here, speak up!)
- a good wire cutter is absolutely essential. My crimper has a decent little cutter built in that’s just the right size, which is handy.
- T568B is what you want unless you have some weird situation
- Never realized how I’ve taken patch cables for granted, even in my days of installing servers. I guess Willy must have made sure we had a common supply, but I can’t really recall.
October 9th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Much harder to do if you’re colorblind. But yeah, it’s pretty easy, and no need to test — just plug ‘em in.
And once you’ve built a few dozen, you start getting a little attitude about the cheap crappy ones in the office. Every time I notice the cable connecting the color laserjet I scoff a little and say, man, ain’t no way that thing is cat5.