Cable Colors

Steve Bertrand steve at ibctech.ca
Tue Jun 17 05:03:32 UTC 2008


David Coulson wrote:
> Steve Bertrand wrote:
>> LOL, simplicity via obscurity at its finest ;)
>>
>> Colour coding works great, and it's easy to follow. Then there is that 
>> issue that pops up where *that* cable over there will work!
>>
> 90% of our movable cable patches (aka stuff that is not hard wired into 
> a patch panel) are less than three feet long and are totally enclosed 
> within individual racks (e.g. server to top of rack switch, switch to 
> patch panel, other side of patch panel to core) - Each end of the cable 
> is labeled, so it's pretty easy to trace it.

Labeling is good. As I've tried to follow the pace of this thread, I 
appreciate where someone else stated that (paraphrased) "males 
essentially have a problem with identifying colours". I personally am 
relatively colour blind (mostly red-orange are the same, as is black-green).

> I care more about cable management when you have something like a 6513 
> with a bunch of 48 port Ethernet blades. Not figured out a way to deal 
> with that which doesn't look like complete crap - Doesn't matter what 
> color they are. The vertical 7600s/6509-VE models are nice, but of 
> course, we don't have those :)

A very good friend of mine who is relatively quite older than I, used to 
run what we (I) would call now the 'IT' department in the Butterfield 
Bank of Bermuda way back years ago (relative), showed me pictures of 
closets which had numerous hundreds of Token Ring MAU connectors, 
attached to cabling dozens of feet long stretched down a corridor 100' 
at least after an effort to 'untangle' the typical 'this needs to be 
patched *to this floor*'.

I will forever remember those pictures, and forever know that no matter 
how badly labeled/coloured an Ethernet infrastructure environment is, it 
can never be as bad as having several hundreds of cables as thick as my 
baby finger, all the same colour, entangled in a mess worse than 
anything I've seen.

I would like to know ANYONE who has a policy strict enough, and enforces 
it so as to have even an almost perfect cabling infrastructure...is 
there such a thing?

God bless CATx cable, especially when it terminates within the same area 
that it originates from ;)

Steve




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