Death to patch panel dot painters

[talula]

So here we are, running cat-5e cable throughout the house making this 100+ year old house network compatable and up to what we expect for the 21 century. Many of the outlets are now usb charging. The wireless is state of the art with repeaters strategically placed. Network keystones in every room with 3 of them alone at the kitchen bar area.

Now comes the time to wire them all into the patch panel in the basement. A beautiful job, wonder to behold, looks lovely.

Except.

The idiot over at the patch panel factory put a brown dot where there should be an orange dot and vs vs. 1.5 hours of diagnostic proves to us that indeed all the wonderful and beautiful wire must be ripped back out and the orange wires swapped with the brown. Only then will the tester tell us life is good.

I hate networks.

tal

[Wolf-Pup (imported)]

Sounds like a good time/reason to get drunk!

[george2u2 (imported)]

You could have "Century Link" tell you you can get broadband over half century old braided telephone wires.

[talula]

Things just got worse. My loving and wonderful roommate thought the wires to the speakers embedded in the living room wall was old so he trimmed them out. Also, the heat has suddenly vanished and there is a clipped off brown cord that looks a lot like old phone line sitting there. The cursing from the basement is prize-winning. I feel bad for him.

Tal

[Losethem (imported)]

What is the cat5 doing that a secured wireless router set-up couldn't do? I'm kind of puzzled why you're running all that wire all over the place.

Not that there's anything wrong with direct wire, but just curious what benefit you're getting related to the cost in time and materials is.

Now cutting the brown wire without first figuring out what it did is priceless. I hope your roommate is having fun figuring out how to put that genie back in the bottle.

--LT

[talula]

Good question. Funny as it may sound I use very few wireless devices because the speed/amount of data is pretty low. The tablet and the cellphone use the wireless. Sometimes my laptop or one that a guest brings.

Everything else uses the gig ethernet. There are 4 servers that run here constantly along with an occational fireup of the vmware server to test somthing. For my work I'll bring home a broken desktop and that will have to get plugged in for various internet-necessary things. It is a pretty busy network as it is but to top it off I get to move very large files around (350 gig +) at times.

It's not that much work or cost. The big overhead is getting a decent router. I'm a great believer in sonicwalls or rigging up a dd-wrt contraption (though the old snapgear was a treat).

Hope I answered the question ok.

tal

[Prudence (imported)]

I'm a great believer in sonicwalls or rigging up a dd-wrt contraption (though the old snapgear was a treat).

DD-WRT rocks. Very nice.

Man I totally feel for you -- I've dealt with incorrectly painted patch panels a few times before.

If you do any more patch panel work in the future, always test out your first connection (or two) before you do the whole panel. That way if the colors are wrong, you only have to re-do your first cable (or two).

What is the cat5 doing that a secured wireless router set-up couldn't do? I'm kind of puzzled why you're running all that wire all over the place.

Not that there's anything wrong with direct wire, but just curious what benefit you're getting related to the cost in time and materials is.

Three main reasons I (much) prefer Wired over Wireless:

Speed: If you do any sort of very data-intensive activity, such as copy large files or serious database access, wired will just totally blow wireless out of the water as far as speed goes. (As long as they are both of the same tech "era" -- ie: unfair to compare a 10-year old wired router/switch to a brand new wireless one).

Security: Wireless is inherently easier to hack because the signal is present anywhere in range. There are newer wireless encryption technologies such as WPA and WPA2 which make hacking much more difficult if not impossible -- but the fact is the signal is still there, all the time. Even with WPA/WPA2, if someone gets or knows your password, they can connect (and many people use really stupid / easily guessed passwords like thier phone number, address, the word "password", the router manufacturer's name, etc). With Wired, the signal exists only in the wires, and the only way someone is connecting is if they get in to your house and plug something in.

Reliability: Wireless can have problems when too many people have Routers/Access Points in too small of a space (for example, apartments or high density housing tracts). Also it can occasionally have problems from other interference such as cordless phones, microwaves, and even in rare cases sunspot activity. Sometimes for no apparent reason, wireless just starts going slow on you. Wired just works.

Actually there's a fourth reason, which is more "conspiracy theory-ish": The possibility that the signals being put off by wireless devices could cause problems for some people such as difficulty sleeping, difficulty concentrating, headaches, reduced fertility, etc. Difficult to prove, so right now I don't give this reason a lot of weight.

[Losethem (imported)]

I use wireless exclusively. I figure if anyone can figure out my WPA2 password which is rather long and random, then they can use my access.

--LT

[Riverwind (imported)]

You know I have watched talula at full tilt, watching three movies at the same time on one screen with a forth window for a chat room then on another monitor playing WOW and in the background uploading and downloading files, like songs or movies, then when everything is working at full tilt he rolls a smoke. Nobody uses a pc like talula if its not doing 8 or 12 things at once its wasting his time. Then on another line he will be working with a computer from his work either loading or down loading software building a system, this is a typical weekend or evening for Talua. He could never do that with wireless although I have watched him test wireless systems that he is building usually for someone at his work while doing all the things I have listed above.

River

[Wolf-Pup (imported)]

Hey Talula,

OS/2 or Windows?