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."

Comments

Well. In the end, how much do you want to spend?

[millisa]

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 . . .

as you can see from the pictures??

[(eternal_software)]

Hint: When you post to Slashdot, make sure your post does not contain the words "as you can see from the pictures"!