Cable Colors

Mark Foster blakjak at blakjak.net
Tue Jun 17 02:24:57 UTC 2008



On Mon, 16 Jun 2008, Joel Jaeggli wrote:

> Joe Greco wrote:
>> Speaking of cables and veering off towards cable-making, I was wondering
>> what people thought of the so-called "EZ RJ45" stuff.  One of the hazards
>> of doing long-term cut-to-length wiring is that if a crimp really goes
>> wrong, you might mess up your artistic work or need to re-cut a new cable.
>> Even having done as many cables as I've done, I occasionally have one go
>> bad.  The EZ stuff looks like an interesting compromise, does anyone with
>> a few thousand crimps worth of experience with it have any comments?
>
> They make a crimper specifically for it, which cuts of the ends. I haven't 
> done a few thousand ends with it but it does make it slightly easier to 
> maintain the twist further into the the plug because you can pull it until 
> snug.
>
> I crimp infrequently enough that I occasionally don't get a spec cable when 
> using conventional connectors.
>

I find this interesting - as lately i've found that keeping a supply of 
various lengths of commercially-manufactured leads of appropriate colours, 
etc, has been a better long term solution than home-made leads.  Perhaps I 
just suck at crimping cables, but I prefer to use commercially made (and 
tested) leads.

The drawback, of course, is when you run out of the right length and wind 
up using longer cables, which in turn makes cable management a bit of a 
mess...

The key of course is Discipline - use the right cable, run the right 
path... ala 'do it once, do it right'.  I've had cause in the past to take 
down entire cabinets for a matter of hours while all cabling is mapped, 
removed and re-fitted (using newer cables / of the right colour / of the 
right length / actually _using_ cable management bars).

[Such outages are often a good opportunity to replace switch equipment 
with newer gear.  I assume we're all OK with electronically tagging ports 
with useful descriptions too??)

One labelling option I've seen used:

http://www.kableflags.com.au/

Another is of course, Dymo - but after a few years these can look tatty 
(if they don't fall off entirely)...

Mark.




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