Extending cat5e - Help!

Any suggestions for resolving this problem as painlessly and cooperatively as possible will be appreciated...

I just had an electrician run a indoor/outdoor cat5e from my office (in an adjacent building) to the basement of my home.

I asked him to run the cable to a particular area in the basement and then leave me 20ft of cable so I feed the line upstairs to a small patch panel and router in a closet.

Attempting to be helpful, he brought the line into the house and cut it off at the fusebox -- far short of where I needed the line. Apparently he thought that I should have the patch-panel and router there.

(Of course, the panel and router won't fit in the cabinet that surrounds the fusebox, and there are no nearby outlets to power the router....)

Do I need a special splice or other device to extend the cat5e? (I hate to make him rerun the whole line -- burying it tore up my yard and made a real mess of things.)

Also, I think this guy is a competent electrician, but I question his networking skills. In my office space, he hooked up two RJ-45 jacks in parallel. (I'm not an expert... and I correct in thinking that each line has to independent and connected by a hub/switch device?)

Can anyone suggest a resource for this guy...? Maybe a cheat-sheet for him to get up to speed on ethernet cabling so he can fix the jack problem?

Thanks! -Queue

P.S. Critical comments about the electrician are not helpful - I live in a smaller close-knit community where cooperation in working out problems is valued over angry words and threats.

Reply to
Queue
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Well, tell him to terminate that line to a bisquit jack down there. Than go buy yourself a patch cord that will reach whereever you are. thats the easiest way, not the right way though. the right way is to repull the whole run again!

Reply to
Perkowski

Can you tell me more about this? The cable is heavy indoor/outdoor, protected in side a conduit and buried about a foot underground.

How could this be done differently?

Thanks! -Cloy

Reply to
Queue

This is _very_ bad practice. Any nearby lightening strike will impose ground differentials that will fry equipment at both ends.

You can install a small surface mount jack, and plug in a 20 ft patchcord.

No, you cannot daisy-chain RJ-45s! Not with ethernet anyways. You can, however, share a sheath and use two pair to each RJ45. There are different ways to do this, some less ugly than others.

-- Robert

Reply to
Robert Redelmeier

Basically, the cable should be buried deeper per NEC code and should be electrically bonded/grounded. If a lighting bolt strike say a tree near the wire it could get onto the wire and fry out your equipment.

Reply to
Perkowski

By using fiber. You are running between different power/MGN neutrals.

I'd get a set of 10/100 UTPFiber tranceivers and a length of fiber. Use them at the "short" end; that gets you ground-loop proofing....

Reply to
David Lesher

How do you get a ground loop, with copper pairs, when there's no ground connection at either end?

Reply to
James Knott

It doesn't matter how good the cable, or how deep it's buried.

During a nearby lightening strike ground potentials are not the same. There's a pattern of high ground potential near the strink dropping off to lower ones further away. Typically kV/m but it won't be linear. I'd roughly say any strink within 100m (or 3x groundstake separation) will cause trouble.

Lets say lightening hits a tree [electrically] closer to building A than building B. The groundstake on building A goes to a higher voltage than the groundstake on building B. Your interbuilding Cat5 becomes a tempting path to relieve this differential, and anything in the way can get fried. The ethernet transceivers have

500V isolation, but that's nothing when talking about lightening.

With fiber. An alternative (if you can find them) is Cat5 service entrance protectors, properly bonded to each building's ground.

-- Robert

Reply to
Robert Redelmeier

I never said there wasn't a problem, but a ground loop isn't it. A ground loop is a problem with a circuit that's grounded at more than one point, so that the difference in ground potential produce noise or harmful currents. If you don't have at least two ground points, you can't have ground loops. With UTP ethernet, you have no ground points. Also, it's entirely possible to have lightning induced problems, without ground loops or even a single ground connection.

Reply to
James Knott

Robert Redelmeier did an excellent job of laying out the issue in his response. The issue is, the card's transceivers have isolation breakdown voltage of 1500V, I believe. {He said 500..] That's warm spit when talking out lightning; 500KV might be a good safe standoff potential.

If you have

BLDG_A BLDG_B

ROUTER==========[a]----------------------------[b]=======ROUTER

where == is UTP cable and -- is fiber, and [ ] is a UTPFiber transceiver, then the differential is the across fiber, period

My suggestion was not as good:

ROUTER====[a']--[b']=================================SWITCH====ROUTER"

as the power for the b' transceiver comes from the A supply. BUT, the most likely thing to happen is the b' box goes to the Great eBay in the Sky. You should make SWITCH something expendable as well..

Reply to
David Lesher

Simple solution is lightning protection on both ends, should be able to pick it up anywhere that sells commercial cabling. Just make sure the fuses are for DATA not analog voice. I've seen this save a lot on equipment. And keep some extra fuses handy.

Fiber is better, but this works without repull>> Robert Redelmeier wrote:

Reply to
RC

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