Cable Colors

Tue Jun 17 00:15:42 UTC 2008

This seems like a good demarcation for the colors, but two things. Its a bit more expensive, and, it typically makes for a pretty mess. You're talking pre determined cable lengths for the most part. I tend to avoid patch cables like the plague and invest in long term deployments cut to length. 

Intelligently strapping in mostly permanent wiring should be worth the investment and reduce outages in the long run. The colors don't hurt. 

Best,

Marty

----- Original Message -----
From: Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com>
To: Glenn Sieb <ges at wingfoot.org>
Cc: nanog at nanog.org <nanog at nanog.org>
Sent: Mon Jun 16 22:56:45 2008
Subject: Re: Cable Colors

I don't know of any hard standard in use anywhere.  I've generally taken
to the following:

Green == low-bandwidth straigh-through
	Telephone, T1, Serial, etc.
Purple == Roll Cables (almost always serial, sometimes telecom)
	(8-1 7-2 6-3 5-4 4-5 3-6 2-7 1-8)
Orange(C) == EIA-568b cross-over cable (ethernet xover)
Orange(F) == Multimode Fiber
Yellow(F) == Singlemode Fiber
White == Clear (inside VPN concentrator network)
Black == Crypt (Outside VPN concentrator network)
Blue == Publicly accessible networks
Red == Backend (usually OOB management) networks
Pink == KVM (KVM switch <-> Dongle)

Occasionally I encounter needs for greater specificity, but, these
usually do most of what I need.

I'm sure others use entirely different choices.

Owen