Cable Management vs. Easy Maintenance

Ok, let me ask you this? Why not just leave the old drop in its original location and add a new one for the phone's new location?

How many MACs do you have a month? 95% of the K-12 I worked in would have us (cabling contractor) run a new drop to the new location, while leaving the old drop intact.

Thing is if you want to use the same drop to move to a different rack where your PoE switches are, you could run into a lot problems. For example not enough service loop to reach new rack, disrupting 110 terminations on old rack when pulling out cable, etc.

Personally, it makes more sense to add a new drop in my opinion.

Perkowski

I don't think he's talking about moving drops, but changing the patch cables so that a jack that was on a non-PoE switch would be moved to a PoE switch when the phone is moved.

No real easy answer beyond using all PoE, which as you said is often cost prohibitive.

When I mix PoE and non-PoE I color code the patch cables. My personal "standard" Yellow=straight-through Ethernet Red=cross-over Ethernet Blue=PoE Green=ISDN-BRI Grey=T1 or PRI

I don't think he's talking about moving drops, but changing the patch cables so that a jack that was on a non-PoE switch would be moved to a PoE switch when the phone is moved.

No real easy answer beyond using all PoE, which as you said is often cost prohibitive.

When I mix PoE and non-PoE I color code the patch cables. My personal "standard" Yellow=straight-through Ethernet Red=cross-over Ethernet Blue=PoE Green=ISDN-BRI Grey=T1 or PRI

Thanks for the replies, but RC is correct. I can explain it a little bit better... typically we have about 3-7 drops per classroom. Each classroom also has 1 phone. So per classroom we need one PoE switch port and between 2 and 6 regular switch ports. When a teacher decides that they to rearrange their room and want their phone on the other side of the classroom and thier network printer where their phone was, we have to go into the closet, track down the port that the phone will be moving to and make sure it is connected to a powered switch, as well as removing the printer's port from a powered switch to a regular switch. It gets really hectic when we are opening a new school and all the teachers desk are set by the moving company, and all the phones and computers are placed by someone else. Then the first day of school, all the teachers come along and rearrange and we have to completely redo the entire wiring of the closet to make sure all the phones will work.

I've considered using a color code, but that still really doesn't help on tracking down the regular cables that have to be switched with the powered ones... Especially if you have a nice cable management with all your cables neatly velcroed or cable tied. :-)

Someone did email me saying I could look into powered patch panels, which I had never heard of before, but I'm afraid that solution would probably be almost as pricey as using all powered switches.

And their may not be a good solution for this other that all PoE switches. I'm kind of a stickler for good cable management, and everytime we start getting moves like this the closets start looking like spider webs.

Thanks for the input, Matt

Tracking down ports for Move/Add/Changes is a bear.

External databases are always out of date, due to troubleshooting, urgent MACs , etc.

Labelling both ends of the patch cables with source and destination, and labelling all runs at both ends, is the right way to go (tm), but often falls short in practice.

Given your environment, why not:

Go to the user location, to confirm what the teacher really wants.

Get the IP and MAC address of the printer (print test page); PC (ipconfig); Mac or Linux box (ifconfig -a); or phone (presumably some test screen.) Catch the jack numbers too.

IP tells you what subnet/vlan your devices are on; and since you know by geography and jack number (hopefully) the closet that pretty much tells you what switches you want.

Now go to the closet to make the switch.

With a laptop, plug in to console port of switches involved. Show the forwarding table entry for those MAC addresses. As long as they are access ports, those are the ones to switch. If an entry shows as one of the trunk ports, try the other switches.

Switch 'em. Relabel the patch cables (if you do that). Remove the old cables (if you do that). Update the database on your laptop (if you do that). Change the description for that port on the switch configuration (if you do that). Bill customer (yes, you do that).

Wrolf

Your situation, with limited PoE ports and people wanting to move their own phone, may actually be an argument in favor of power-bricks (wall-warts, Transformers). If your phones don't have a separate power plug, there are one port PoE power "injectors" that could be placed at the phone.

The biggest issue with independent power supplies isn't cost, they are usually cheaper, its power reliability. Put a UPS on the PoE switch and the phones stay up in a blackout. This is VERY important in a school. On the other hand, I've been at schools with building UPSs, along with a backup generator.

No one solution will ever fit all the possibilities, thank god, this is what keeps me employed and in demand ;-)

If I was designing network for a school, I would have a patch panel and hub in each classroom. Feeding the class room from a more traditional wiring closet someplace I'd have four or so UTP cables going to the patch panel in the room, and pull in a couple strands of fiber for future use. Bring in one poe line for the phone from the wiring closet, on the telephone subnet, and normal data line which feeds a N port hub for the classroom. If you only need a teachers computer and a printer, then one of those cheapie 4 port hubs would be fine. Need to support a connection for each student, put in a 24 or so port hub. Make the POE patch cable a different color, and the POE telephone uplink port appear different on the label. (color and symbology) This empoweres the clueful teachers to rearrange their rooms the way they want without having to call you to do the change. This also gets the teachers to help each other out, rather than having to depend on a tech to come out for every piddling little change, which makes nobody happey.

--Dale

Don't know if this helps your situation or not.

If I do not have a cables labeled or diagrammed, I use a small ethernet tester that pulses the LED on the switch port that it is plugged into. Some cable verifiers will do this too, but I picked my little unit up online for about $30 or so.

Plug it in at the drop and look for the pulsing LED on the switch. When you have a lot of ports to look at it can be time consuming, but if you do not have a diagram of the drop locations then this can be very helpful.

charles

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