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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
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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.
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.
WiFi is great, I like being able to work on my back deck with my laptop when it's nice out. But sometimes I need to transfer large files to or from my desktop. That's why I chose to run a buttload of cable everywhere while the plumbers were in installing our central air and the holes existed. I just pop in, sit down in my dining room, transfer the file, and head back out.
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I should have taken pictures of the Cat5e/RG-6QS runs throughout my old house. Every place that had a box got one of the following:
-Box 1---
(2) blue cat5e (data)
(1) white cat5e (voice)
(1) RG-6QS (CATV)
-Box 2---
(1) blue cat5e (data)
(1) white cat5e (voice)
(1) RG-6QS (CATV)
In an existing home (esp mine with finished drywall ceilings in the basement[Uck!]), this project for the weekend warrior could take a couple weeks. But, it now has GigE capable drops to each room in the house (at least one in -every- room, including bathrooms) (it's been spec'd out to 100Base-T, though the cable is capable of GigE).
It was all finished off with a 48-port Panduit patch panel (not cheap, but used Panduit throughout the house), connected to an inexpensive rack-mount 24-port 10/100 unmanaged switch for data (mounted in a low-depth [~8"] 4U hinged wall mount rack) and a good old 66-block for the voice (that, I'll admit is a jury-rigged setup). I also tagged a whole-house distribution amplifier from SmartHome to drive the 6 TVs (analog cable w/ one cablemodem before the amp) without any distortion in the higher channels.
All in all I believe it was a well done project and well worth the time and materials invested into it.
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Nothing beats lying in bed, wirelessly sending email. :)
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I take it you're one of the
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
Really, Google is your friend: Structured Wiring How-To.
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its highly unlikely that even though the cable is CAT5, that it is run to CAT5 specs. There are a lot of physical restrictions that make a CAT5 run CAT5, such as "more than X distance from florescent lighting", and "No bends less than X inches in radius". ( I forget the exact numbers).
You can run standard 10Mbps Ethernet over Cat3 all day. FastE wants CAT5 to run clean, but you can get away with it for really short runs.
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.
The solid core ones tend to have an edge that hits the wire while the stranded ones tend to use two (or three) points that cut into the wire.
Some of the better solid ones have two blades that hit both sides of the wire. There are also cheap ones that happen to crimp into foil wire which tends to be found in the cheap flexiable cords used in phone handsets.
You also need to get the jacket shape right. They come in round and flat and short and long body. Most of the Rj11 ones are short and most of the RJ45s are long.
If you need this to work for years or decades, you have to do it right. Its like putting RJ11 into RJ45, it works till you need to use the outer two pins because they won't have the reliably of the middle 6.