Considering Re-Cabling My Switches, Advice Needed!

[farquea]

I have inherited a bit of a messy server room and switch cabinets. Our network has been setup with 2 VLANS, Admin and Curricuclum, but rather stupidly Teacher PC's were put onto the Admin VLAN. They also used black cables for phones, green for wireless and grey for everything else.

However phones have been moved around god knows how much so i want to scrap that idea and just have maybe black for Admin and grey for Curriculum. Currently the switches will have a mixture of Curriculum and Admin configured VLAN ports on it.

 

Would it be a good idea to assign a few switches to be purely Admin VLAN devices connected to it and other switches to just have curriculum devices plugged into it?

 

I just want advice on best practice on how to re-cable and a decent system to put in place. i imagine a good idea will be to cable in all patch panel ports to switches too then cable tie everything off?

[EduTech]

Cable Tie's are great! but when it comes to patching it can cause you a headache when you need to trace cables.. don't you have any cable management in your rack?

 

Gator Industrial Rack Mount Cable and Wire Management

 

Cables being patched int patch panels.. fine to be cable tied up

 

Just a thought..

 

James.

[plexer]

I think colour coding patch leads for different purposes is good but you just have to stick to it.

 

Ben

[farquea]

yeah the problem is people moving their rooms around over the years means the phones have been plugged into different ports than they were originally so now i cant be sure if a black cable in the switch actually has a phone plugged into it at the other end.

[Butuz]

Yeh have a good reorganise one cab at a time.

 

I colour code cables each Vlan has its own colour, also if you can sub-colour code cables for link speed to e.g dark blue = admin vlan 1gb, light blue = admin vlan 100mb etc.

 

It's a bit of a mammouth job and still ongoing for me but will get all cabs done eventually!!!

 

Butuz

[User3204]

I started re patching our cabinets by paying a contractor to come in to audit our network sockets.

They renumbered (to our specs), tested, each socket, then this was entered onto a map and a spreadsheet.

 

This meant I knew what I could disconnect at the switch end.

 

Colour coding is great too. We have the following:

Uplinks = Red

Staff wired = yellow

phones = orange

wireless = green

student workstations = white/grey

external / dmz = purple

Then we separate each ICT suite on the following rota: black, blue, pink, and then grey... I was a little surprised that I ended up with 4 ICT suites in one cabinet - but the numbering in this cab goes from 1 to over 400.

 

 

 

Get a plan, work out what lengths of cable you can get away with (the shorter the better).

Pink cables are hard to find for sale...

[User3204]

... actually when I think about this I'm planning to re do the cabling in this large cab during easter.

 

 

 

Oh and the colour coding went out the window for the server side cabinet switches.

[localzuk]

One thing to make sure you have is velcro cable ties - not the plastic ones. They can bundle cables nicely, but can be undone easily.

 

Colour coding is fine, if you have complete control over what port gets used for what. Otherwise, simplify it as much as possible.

[sted]

One thing to make sure you have is velcro cable ties - not the plastic ones. They can bundle cables nicely, but can be undone easily.

 

Colour coding is fine, if you have complete control over what port gets used for what. Otherwise, simplify it as much as possible.

 

or just a roll of double sided velcro and cut to length

[plexer]

Patchsee patchgrip is great stuff.

 

Ben

[mpe]

yeah the problem is people moving their rooms around over the years means the phones have been plugged into different ports than they were originally so now i cant be sure if a black cable in the switch actually has a phone plugged into it at the other end.

 

In which case you need a rule along the lines that re patching is only performed by you (or members of your team). It makes things a lot easier if there's a record of what device is connected to which switch port. Even if you arn't using port based VLAN tagging.