Know Your Network – Cabling

I’ve been involved in quite a few installs, troubleshooting and cleanup projects lately and thought I would share some of my thoughts. I guess some can see the “Tony Rant” coming ;)

Cabling is an import part of networking but I find that a lot of it is taken for granted. Best case scenario is that the cabling causes an outage so you can address the issue. Worst case scenario is that the issue causes intermittent performance issues and goes unresolved.

Fibre and copper all have their own specific requirements to consider that range from length, connectors and installation best practices.

In this specific example I was working on a cabinet and realized that the snagless cables used went into the switch port groove making them impossible to remove. After 5 minutes of trying with needle nose pliers, screwdrivers and other pliers, I finally cut the rubber flaps off.

In my opinion, if this was such a problem to unplug now, it would be worse during a network outage or installation.

I’ve included a photo of the snagless cable I mentioned.

The moral of the story is to consider the support people or others who may have to work on your network after your install.