The distance between the Master Cab and the servers

Right, long story short. Before i started at my current school some company (dunno who, i imagine it was through the council) came and did a few things with the network cabling for free, which included moving the Master Cab from high on the wall into a cupboard. Then some genius suggested to the ICT Co-ordinator that the servers be in there too so the network ran faster. Surely anyone with some knowledge of IT would know that it was far too small for 3 servers (1 curric, 1 admin and squid), 2 UPS's and a giant cab to live in comfortably.

Now as you can imagine the server cupboard is stupidly hot, we've added another fan and its made very little difference. We had to have Tempus in the other day as our squid server died and the technician mentioned to the Bursar that it was far too hot in there and now she is worried that if anything was to go pop they will refuse to have anything to do with it which i think is a very good point.

So i was considering possibly moving 1 or 2 of the servers back where they came from which was a store room with more breathing space and another cab.

How long do the cables have to be before you start to notice any sort of reduction in speed? We're not talking miles, just across the building... :confused:

Cat5e is good for a Gig up to 100 meters max length. Any loss will be pretty neglidgable.

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Originally Posted by Little-Miss

How long do the cables have to be before you start to notice any sort of reduction in speed? We're not talking miles, just across the building... :confused:

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As long as it's proper cable installed well (competently, anyway) you won't notice :)

Hi Little Miss

Sorry I cant help with an answer regarding the distance but if you decide to go for another cab and you are looking for a price drop me the details and id be happy to provide a quotation.

Thanks

That's what i thought! I'm putting the bloody things back i think! :D

Here come the daft questions....:o

Out of interest is there a way i could test it without heaving the things back to the other side of the building?

I'm sure its fine, cus no one has commented about there being any difference since ive been there.

Make up a cable of the length from Cab to new location and just plug it in where it sits at the minute.

Honestly though, you won't notice a difference at all.

Slap a PC there running XP and a PC in the cupboard and copy the same several gb file to the same location and see if there's much variation in speed.

I can get files from half way across the network with absolutely minimal drop-off (talking several seconds) during logon times... so I can't see any major issues with doing it.

Ultimately in the interest of hardware preservation and health and safety, you can ram that argument at them... or try at least :)

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Originally Posted by DevilsAdvocate

Make up a cable of the length from Cab to new location and just plug it in where it sits at the minute.

Honestly though, you won't notice a difference at all.

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If you havent got a cable the right length and you want to try it let me know, i should be able to get one made up free of charge for you to try it.

Assuming you have some network ports in the store room where they used to be, why not just plug in a laptop and transfer some large files backwards and forwards to the servers and see if you notice any difference. A significant number of packets that have to be retransmitted will end up slowing down the transfers.

I used to work in manufacturing on a very large site and we used fibre optic connections but only between different buildings. Anything within the building just used cat5e with no problems at all and some of the cable runs were quite long.


To be honest even if you have some slowdown it is probably best to move some or all before they burst into flames as the heat will be doing them no good at all.

Richard

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Originally Posted by Little-Miss

Out of interest is there a way i could test it without heaving the things back to the other side of the building?

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Or use your fancy Test-Um Validator (or ridiculously expensive Fluke) cable tester :rolleyes:

Ah stuff it, i'm gonna put them back where they were.

Seriously TNE, that would be a bloody long cable! Thanks for the offer. :D

Being a typical women i have no concept of distance (;)) but i doubt its 100 meters away from the old location!

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in the interest of hardware preservation and health and safety

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i'll use that one!

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Originally Posted by Little-Miss

Seriously TNE, that would be a bloody long cable! Thanks for the offer. :D

Being a typical women i have no concept of distance (;)) but i doubt its 100 meters away from the old location!

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No problem, we wouldnt have cut and wrapped the cable it would of been left in the box and just terminated each end. ;)

If you can obtain a floorplan, you should be able to easily estimate the distance.
Ceiling and floor tiles also make good "ready reckoners" for distance, measure one, multiply up.

FWIW, due to "strangelayoutitis" in our Leeds office, our main switches are a way away from our servers now, and it makes bog all difference to anything.

Bear in mind the difference in latency between my nearest local server here in Yorkshire and one in our Charlotte, NC office is (empirically) 50ms for a one-way trip. Thats not that laggy, and on an *extremely* long cable :)