Monitoring my home netowrk

Thanks, I will give it a try when I have repaired my routers. A certain "bright spark" decided to re-route a cat6 cable without unplugging either end, so when I get some new RJ45 Skt's I will be busy with the soldering iron and glue.

kev hath wroth:

Next time, break off the RJ45 locking tabs, so that when someone trips over the cable, it just unplugs instead of destroying the connectors. I don't do that, but I've been tempted.

A local contractor was stuck with moving a wall mounted ethernet patch panel out of a closet and into the adjacent office. He couldn't figure out how to undo the bundle of about 30 CAT5e cables, so he just marked the cables, and cut them. When reassembled, I found everything has been neatly spliced back together with about 250 small electrical wire nuts. Much to my amazement, it worked just fine, so we decided to leave it. I have photos but the customer threatened me with violence or non-payment if I posted them.

I also have photos of what happens when someone pulls on the wrong cable bundle. The part time weight lifter and laborer managed to rip about half of the 64 assorted Type 110 cable terminations out of the back of the rack panels.

Note the patch panel on the left:

Don't do it like that.

Here's the home networking version:

Don't do it like that.

Unfortunately people running round with vacuum cleaners and dusters have a tendency to displace them if you do this.

Spend $25.00 for some decent crimps

??? Crimps won't repair the damage to the routers and there is no damage to the cable.

kev hath wroth:

Oh yes, that's a problem. Since day one in the computer biz, I've made it a point to enforce my very own brand of "no wires on the floor" rule. This is nothing new as I inherited it from the studio sound business, where cables on the floor are a guaranteed invitation to disaster. Same with test benches in engineering labs.

The enemy of cables on the floor is the rotary linoleum floor buffer. This device was apparently designed specifically to grab any cables in its path, and inflict the maximum amount of damage on whatever is attached to the cable ends. I've seen chassis mounted BNC connectors bent at an angle after being snared by a floor polisher. To insure maximum damage, the floor polisher has no means of efficiently stopping the rotating disk. In addition, the operators are encouraged to polish in areas where they can't visually determine if there are any cables.

At one of the places I worked floor polishers were banned. We used to have the floors "polished" but H&S decided it was a hazard and a water based system had to be used, however water and electronics do not mix so this was also banned and only vacuum cleaners and anti-static dusters were used. Most of the cables were in trunking but we used to have some calibrated cables, for microwave testing on some mobile rigs, and these had a tendency to droop on the floor and we used to get the occasional end knocked off( at a few hundred pounds a cable I was glad I wasn't paying) and due to the rigs not being static there was little to be done. The other problem with mobile test rigs is that people try to move them without disconnecting all the cables, annoyingly this mainly seemed to occur during the middle of the night.