Colour coding endpoints and devices

Over the summer I'll be colour coding endpoints and devices using ethernet cables. 0.5m for patch panel and 2m for endpoints.
I've a few questions however regarding the 0.5m patch cables are they able to achieve gigabit speeds at such a sort length? I'm sure I read something about a minimum length for a CAT5e cable but google isn't bringing anything solid up.

Are patch cables pretty much the same quality from various places? such as, CPC, comms-express, rs-online, cable monkey, broadbandbuyer etc etc.
I'll also be getting some Cisco SG300-52 and SG300-28 series gigabit switches to drive it all.

My thinking for colouring is:
Yellow for Printers
Red for Server
Blue for Desktops
Grey for Guest ports
Orange for Promethean PC's
Black for NAS
Pink for Smoothwalls
Purple for Routers

Any thoughts? recommendations?

Sounds good - Network Cables are essentially Network cables! Make sure you get ones with a decent boot on them otherwise they can snap easily.

Apart from that its fine - Oh and Brown for printers!

Go on I'll bite. Why brown for printers? :D

I would say buy mayflex excel patch leads they are lovely, last ones I bought from comms-express were very wirey and springy.

Ben

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gaz

Go on I'll bite. Why brown for printers? :D

---

Just because i have always done brown for printers as they tend to be the biggest pain in the backside i.e brown :)

Yeap, should work fine. Your lucky you can get so many colours there, our suppliers strech to blue, grey, white and sometimes yellow and red.

We use colours to denote length and purpose:

Yellow = 1 to 3 metres and for client devices / printers.
Green = 3, 5 or 10 metres and is for servers
Red = Uplinks between switches or Danger Will Robinson scenarios.
Orange = POE
Black = Storage
Blue = Generic 0.3 to 0.5m patch panel to switch cable
Grey = This is an old cable that needs replacing.

Being able to ask "is the yellow cable plugged in?" saves a lot of walking across the school.

The only thing I'd be leaning towards is the clips, I have found some of the clips don't work in some patch panels very well.

the scheme I use is:
Red = Links, and uplinks
Orange = Phones
Yellow = Staff desktops
Green = Wireless APs
Blue = ICT suite 1
Black = ICT suite 2
Pink = ICT suite 3
White = General student desktops
Grey = same as white, but I am getting to the stage where I can start to split them
Purple / Indigo = Links to outside the school (LA upstream/ICT ADSL)


.. Hmm brown, this is a colour I've not seen before..


What I have found that was really useful, was getting some cable labelling sticky paper (not tape), which I could print onto, this has meant I have labelled the 400 cables in the main switch cabinet at both ends, with a unique number, and what use, and the length of the cable. I'll dig out the name and label info tomorrow. I started labelling them when my network cabler told me they couldn't get any other cable colours.


The only cabinet where this doesn't apply is the Server cabinet, where I need to have a go through as when you have 4 or 8 red leads going to one server it gets a bit confusing, and I haven't labelled these cables yet.


All the leads in classrooms and offices are generally grey/white, the only times this is different is in the ICT offices, and the Siemens phones that all came with a thick black cable.


I also use 6" cables for switch to switch when I can get away with it. I get gigabit over it, so the length is not a problem.

Cheers for the ideas.
I was going to colour code the actual devices as well not just in the patch panel side.
I forgot about the uplink, we only have 1 so I think I'll use Red for that, my logic behind the colour Red for servers is that Red = danger, i.e. don't unplug!!! same goes for uplink.

The comms-express cables seem very good value for money, but I've not used them before. I may as well get them from there as I'll be getting the rest of the kit from them.