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Organizing Home Network Cables?
not-so Anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "A few years ago, while finishing our basement, we wired each room of our house with two CAT-5 and two RG-6 cables. All of the cables were run to a central place in the basement, with the intent of building a "cabinet" to house and better organize the cables. Well, it is time. As you can see from the pictures, it is a jumbled morass of spaghetti. So I'd like to get ideas from the Slashdot crowd as to how to finally organize this mess, build the cabinet, etc., etc. No doubt there are many other readers in a similar situation, wanting ideas for organizing all the communications/network cables in their home."
I've been wanting to do something like that for a long-time, but the time investment is just too large.
You should probably get a couple of patch panels and mount them in a rack..that's the most elegant solution!
Krone
Siemon
Small, shallow rack enclosure:
here Connect the leads coming out of the wall to the back of the patch panels and use short cat5 leads to link them together (or into a rack mountable hub/switch, like this one here). If you do buy a rack mountable switch, make sure it's not too deep for your cabinet.
Not sure what to do about the RG6 cables, but I imagine you can get patch panels for them too (although too many joints may kill your signal..)
thats not too bad of a mess. id say all you need are:
1.) a small patch panel
2.) tie wraps
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
Yeah, a properly secured WiFi network...
Why does a single house need that many cables in the closet anyway? I know that I have a mess of power, 10baseT and USB cables next to my workstation (many of them belonging to the broken/obsolete appliances and totally unused), but how many places in your house do you need to run a real cable connection to?
Paul B.
Get a Paladin Toner and Probe (somewhere around $80) or something similar. Get your son/wife/trainedchimp to go through jacks plugging in the toner (cellphones help here; or just yell real loud) while you tone the cable to find which one is which.
Assuming you are putting these cables in a Patch panel you can just masking tape label them until you get them into their ports. Worst case is the tape comes off and you have to retone your wires (you didn't seem to have more than 30?). As for Making it look pretty just go with whatever cable management fits your budget and your mounting method. If it's in a basement and the stuff isn't gonna be bumped, you might as well go with an open relay rack bolted into your floor (you can hacksaw them down to size fairly easily since they are usually aluminum).
Supplied links are my personal hardware preferences . . .
They also make "universal" patch panels that accept up to 12 snap in connectors (like you can get at Home Depot -- they're cheaper in contracter packs). These come in 8P8C, 6P6C, Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, RF, line level audio, and blank varieties. Terminate the incoming lines to a connector on a patch panel. Then you patch from there to whereever (a satellite multiswitch, or RF amp, or router/firewall) as appropriate.
For POTS (telephone lines), you can use cheap BIX-66 blocks (which happen to be the same size as the universal ones): you don't need fancy patch panels for that if you get good with a punch-down tool. Hint: get a good one, like a Greenlee. Last time I checked, they were about US$45 at Home depot, and the extra blade was another $15: you'll want a 66 and a 110 blade.
Save $$$ and make your own patch cables: get a spool or Cat5e and a crimping tool -- I happen to like Greenlee, but that's just from personal experience and satisfaction. The crimping tool goes for around US$60 and comes in a kit with a bunch of 8P8C and 6P6C plugs.
I did this in the first house I wired, as a retrofit withe the enclosures mounted on-wall. I used two enclosures: one for RF stuff, and one for voice and data. this was for a five bedroom 3200 square foot house. Yeah, 2xCat5e and 2xRG6-U cable to each drop.
Don't forget to allow for incoming lines: like from the phone company, cable company, and/or satellite dish. Hint, wire TWO cables to the POTS and cable entrances: that way you can "return" a feed to legacy house wiring (all in parallel) from your head end to the point where it used to enter the house.
In the next house I wired, I actually got an on-wall SwingLine rack (Ebay is great!), and rack-mountable patch panels. This costs a bit more, but lets you mount rack-mounted equipment, like multiswitches, routers, etc. Do leave a "universal" mounting board (plywood) nearby where you can mount equipment that can't be mounted in a rack. Alternately, have a shelf for such equipment (though I prefer wall mounts wherever possible).
You could've hired me.
I've done almost exactly the same thing, only with (it looks like) three to four times as many drops. Large house, did at least two drops per room, also two cat5e and two RG-6.
Trouble is, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to wire phones properly over one of the two cat5e lines. I'd really like to have them terminated in a 48-port patch panel I have, so I can just run around and swap the terminator key jacks on the outlets when I want to go RJ45 everywhere.
So, it looks like this: Top row (24 ports) of the patch panel terminate on RJ-11 jacks on the other end. The bottom row (24 ports) terminate on RJ-11 jacks in the same outlets.
Any advice on what to get to finish this? I've got one Cat5e cable coming into that room, which is the main line[s], and I want all the phone lines to connect to that.
Any advice on the RG-6 would also be dandy. Preferably something that can cope with DirectTV
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
First put your drywall up. It looks like you already have an electrical outlet nearby. You might want another one there and now is the time to do it. I would make separate holes for the Cat5 and the RG6. Then put up a 2'x2' plywood backboard to screw things into. Screw that into the studs with drywall screws. Go buy a drill bit that makes 2" holes so it looks nice where the cables feed out.
Forget the cabinet. Just buy a little 19" rack with about 12 RJ45 jacks (modular racks are much more expensive but then you could probably terminate your RG6 into it) and terminate all your cat5 wire neatly. Punch down all 8 conductors. That way you may be able to do 1000Mbit networking on your cat5 wire IF the runs are short and IF you bought cat5e connectors for both ends and IF you terminated to 5e spec using the 568a or b wiring standard.
Also make sure that the rack you buy lets you plug RJ12 into the same connectors so you can use the wiring for phones if you feel like it. Of course you would need dialtone down there to do that and a way to split it out. That's why I suggested a rack with 12 connectors. Punch down several of those to a 66 block and then you can cross connect dialtone to any of the new connectors.
You don't need a 19" switch to mount in the rack. Just mount your little switches or routers above the rack to the backboard using woodscrews. It will still look very nice and neat. Use 3' patch cables to reduce clutter. This whole project should cost you about $120 not counting the drywall or the short patch cables.
Hint: When you post to Slashdot, make sure your post does not contain the words "as you can see from the pictures"!
I used to hate wireless.. then my new notebook came with 802.11g, I bought a cheap access point.. and I absolutely love it. Nothing beats lying in bed, wirelessly sending email. :)
I do, however, run fully secured (to the best of my knowledge) - and I use an SSH tunnel whenever dealing with work files and data. To the point that I've set things up so that I *have* to use this double-encryption if I want to access anything critical wirelessly.
I feel your pain though, I still have four wired computers / devices and the closet my DSL modem is in is an absolute mess. My study and living room are wired - that's where the desktops and the game console is - but I'm not bothering with wires for any of the other rooms.
A good solution to the cable problem is - above all else - neat and well-organised. If you make things tidy and functional (certain number of ports on a switch, ability to see where wires go, reasonably easy access if you want it) - the rest of your problem (what type of enclosure, where to mount it) should solve itself.
it looks fine to me. i mean it is in the basement on a wall with no drywall. why waste your money/time (time = money so money2) on building a cabinet now? if i were you i'd just get some zip ties and booze.
\x69 \x68\x69\x64 \x74\x68\x65 \x62\x6f\x64\x69\x65\x73 \x69\x6e \x74\x68\x65 \x66\x72\x65\x65\x7a\x65\x72
We had a large mass of cabling coming out of the ceiling at work similar to your pictures. We used dryer vent hose to hide it all. Of course now our rack looks like some deranged dryer exhausting itself into the ceiling, but you don't see any spaghetti. I guess you could use that downspout extender tubing stuff if you wanted it to be more rigid. Either way it's cheap!
move along, nothing to
I have a 'managed cabling' system where I work that handles the telephone system as well as data networking. All the distribution cables come into one set of (RJ45) patch panels in a rack; the incoming telephony copper pairs also come into one (RJ45) patch panel. We can patch through the phone lines to any distribution drop and plug in the phone using a PABX Master RJ45 to BT Adapter. Note that these act as a 'master' socket, so we don't have to have them lined up on the wall next to the rack. Of course, these are for the British Telecom system; I'm not what you would need where you are. When we put in a PBX, we will either get a rack mounted one with patch panels on the front or mount it on the wall and wire it to a patch panel in the rack.
In the British Telecom system, extension sockets are just placed in bus topology on the incoming pair plus the 'ringer' output from the master socket, so you could do this by terminating a three wires runnning down the back of a patch panel on each socket or some such.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Or you could pake one cat 5 cable that connects the a pair together, plug it in sequentially on each socket, and make another cat 5 cable that takes those pairs and gives you two wires. Plug into a multimeter and measure resistance (you might have a beeping continuity checker in yours). Wait for the low resistance.
Total cost less then $5 including the meter.
Spending $80 on checking a few cables for home use is stupid. You'll do it once and that's it.
It's true. In fact, I'm posting this from the bathroom. ;-)
The end has to be terminated first if you wanna do that, however. While you could punch down and just label the jacks later, it's a whole lot easier in the long run to have the jacks from one wall outlet in a group, and to have all those groups in a room grouped together. If you punch down and label later, you can't exactly do that.
Really, Google is your friend: Structured Wiring How-To.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Currently, the "center" of this network is in my basement, with a smaller "center" in my bigger barn. Think of it as two networks, one in the big barn, one in the house, connected by three CAT-5e cables running down the side of the back yard. The barn contains 9 computers, plus a firewall separating my network from my neighbor's, a firewall separating the house from the barn, and a webserver running Slash, among other things, which I hope will become our community's site when our little mini-Internet is done. (My smaller barn will be the NOC, if you will, when this thing is up and running. The neighbors are excited because most of them, on the other side of the county line, do not have access to DSL or Cablemodem. The talks right now say that everyone on my side of the county line will get a broadband connection, and I will route packets from my small barn...)
But here's the part that's interesting to you with your question: The basement in my house has a small room that I built, a control room, if you will. It's about 5 feet by 8 feet, and contains the controls for everything... the computer networks, the sprinklers, the electrical panels, everything. I have 65 or so CAT-5e cables running into this room. These are the three cables running in from the barn, and 60 or so from all the rooms in the house. That is, I didn't want hubs scattered all over the place, so I ran between 8 and 12 wires to each room, depending on what I thought would be needed. This was actually cheaper than buying a bunch of hubs, and not as unsightly because the wires come to wall connectors. In the control room, the wires all enter a wooden cabinet I built for the purpose, where they are nicely routed into a series of hubs, mounted on the side walls of the cabinet. Each wire is labeled, so I know what's going on. From here, one wire goes to a NAT/firewall box, which goes into the DSL. Another three run to the barn. Surprisingly, the entire thing worked the first time I turned it all on... The ultimate geek wired house, in the middle of the hills of southern Indiana. Now that's what I call fun.
I've never been able to find a definitive on whether you can reliably use standard crimpable ends on solid core. I've always found it to cause problems. While some people swear they never have a problem.
I have also run into problems where CAT3 runs have been put stereo companies or electitions, sometime even marked as CAT5. (or even better have CAT5 spliced at the ends of the runs in the wall.) What are the limits when using ethernet over CAT3?
=1000101
wireline equivalent protection, or something? ;-) I did not say "secure WiFi", I said "properly secured", which would just mean "as secure as the phone line out of the house", i.e., not at all against someone who cares about YOU in particular, but good enough against a random wardriver.
Paul B.
I find that it's much easier to use your carpet as a source of organization. Or, better yet, staple your cables to the walls and/or cabinetry. I recommend purchasing multi-colored cabling, to show off your diversity. As for patch-panels.. well, it's far easier to daisy-chain a few 4-port hubs together and let them hang off a wall, suspended by a few cables. Nothing says elegance quite like a cabling setup that uses all available resources.
First off, get a nice patch panel and run your cables through that. Make sure that everything's labeled, and then you can have all the fun that you may want to with your home network/sub nets/whatever.
Also just get a mini (or a full-sized if you want to be the big dog among your geek friends) rack and mount the panel in there, as well as all of your other servers or whatever, and you shouldn't have to worry about noise from fans or even heating/cooling (assuming that your basement is all underground, and not one of the semi-basements).
Ebay has a lot of those goodies for cheap if you can wait the time for them to be delivered.
Or you could just plug a damn laptop in and go through the cables one at a time plugging them into a $5 hub. You guys make everything too difficult...
+++OK ATH
Why didn't you go with multi-port in-wall switches/hubs? Cost?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Actually, I'd say your current layout looks rather organic ... like something you would find in an equipment bay on the Taelon mother ship.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I used PVC tubing from the local hardware store. It is intended for plubing, but you can fit a lot of wires inside a 2 inch tube. I use the tubing for vertical runs, similar to the pictures you included. I have this setup in a warehouse. The plastic PVC tubing is used to channel all the wires meeting at the hubs/switches/routers. Throughout the warehouse, I use steel 1/2" metal tubing to send the network cable to various jacks. This tubing was lying in a corner at the warehouse. I don't know if it is for plumbing or electrical conduit, but it looks very similar to electrical conduit tubing. I went to the extra effort to run electrical power cords in separate tubes than data/communications CAT5 cable. The tubing/conduit is resistant to being knocked, snagged, or cut. One full year with no problems.