Setting up a fresh network?
 

Like a lot of small companies our network has grown as a patchwork as need. It has all sorts of different components.

We have several rack mount Network RAID devices and a couple of other rack mount devices. They have just been sitting on the tables.

We just bought a big empty rack and we are going to bite the bullet and take everything apart and stuff it into the rack. Now is the time to upgrade the cables. Our network has some 10 year old components and cables.

The real point of this post is to ask a question (or two) ;)

Should we just replace every single cable with a fresh new Cat 6 cable? I don't think any of the current cables are anything but Cat 5. We are thinking of getting a 200 ft roll of cable and a crimping tool to make the cables the proper length so there is not a pile of excess cable. Is there any trick to making a good Cat 6 cable? Where is a good source for the cable and crimper. I don't want Radio Shack stuff, we want to do it right the first time.

a local big electronic warehouse store. get a spool. crimper u can get at same place...or order online. but dunno if shipping a spool is worth it

I've crimped way more cable than I care to think about.

Personally I'd only crimp my own for long runs across the building.

For short rack runs I won't do my own. No reason to really. Buy different lengths and you can achieve the same thing without the risk of a couple of bad crimps causing issues.

Your time is much better spent clearly labeling each cable on both ends.

YMMV

Yep!!!

I'll add, in addition to clearly labeling each cable, label the port where they plug in as well. When verified all the network drops at Harvey's in Lake Tahoe 10 years ago, we annotated which switch/port/etc on the labels next to the jacks. Did the same on the switches. Made troubleshooting soooo much easier.

Randy

OK, but what about going to Cat 6? Is that worthwhile or should we just stick with our old cables?

How much gig equipment do you use? How long are your runs?

What speed are you running? 10Mbt? 100Mbt? 1Gb? 10Gb?

What spec are your current cables? If they're 10 years old, then there may be some room for improvement, but if you're < 1Gb you probably won't see it.

If you have the cash, go cat 6, although I don't think the price diff is that great anyway.

FWIW, we've been migrating to fiber for the past few years. In the new data center I'm moving into, we have more fiber drops than Cu drops.

We move a lot of HUGE files around. All the switches are all 1Gb. Our average scan is a 1GB image. Some jobs have 500 images. All the current cables were just cheapies from a retail store.

We have 20 TB of RAID storage now and we are looking at another 12 TB RAID soon. Any future switches will be 10 Gb

Never crimp your own cables except in extreme circumstances, they are too easy to get wrong. Even if you're good at it, it's easy to accidentally mix stranded wire and solid connectors, or the other way around, etc.

I usually just keep around a bunch of selection of 1',3',5' and 7' cables for desktop and rack stuff, and a couple odd long ones for when something comes up.

And Widebody is right, you're not going to gain anything if you're <1Gbps by replacing the old cables.

You can make it much prettier though, and that is quite important. :D

Couldn't agree more - quite apart from the time factor, if you look, you should be able to buy moulded, tested cables in standard sizes for less than than the cost of the parts to build your own. The last RJ-45 cables I made professionally (about 11 years ago) had odd-ball wiring for async server consoles. Even for home use, I buy machine made/tested cables. I might repair a connector if I can't be bothered to pull a replacement, but that's about it.

It doesn't sound (based on a 200ft reel of cable) like you have many machines/drops to worry about. Otherwise I'd advise that a professional outfit can astonish you with how fast/tidy/well/cheap they can do such jobs.

I bought a $40 cable tester that maps out pairs, measures cross-talk, length and various other useful information - including wiremapping the runs. I won't use a cable I crimped without one - they can save much time. A professional wiring outfit will have a $5,000 tool that does the same thing (and much more besides).

The exact same crimping tools that Radio Shack carry look to be on Ebay for a fraction of the price (like about 10%). The "professional" crimping equipment? Probably really not worth the money unless you're a contractor doing it for a living - plus most of the mid-priced stuff I've seen is little (or no) better than a decent $10 Chinese-made one.

Buy decent plugs, boots, punchdown blocks and patch panels and cable. But mostly buy ready-made good quality cable.

Bear in mind that you can run 10G over cat 6. Which will be useful when your new equipment comes with such interfaces. Even at 1G speeds, cat 6 is better shielded/less cross talk than cat 5. Which might matter for your longer runs - your core gear should always use the highest speeds possible.

Depending on the current/future size of the environment, if you haven't already done so, now might also be a good time to consider the size of your broadcast domains, e.g. think about separating desktop, servers/NAS appliances, DMZ etc. into their own VLAN(s) and/or address space. It gets much harder to do later...

Crimping cable.....*shudder*. Its not rocket science, but even if you know what you are doing, its easy to get it wrong.

I'm voting, if you can, go cat 6. Make sure that you purchase everything together and matching (stranded/unstranded, only cat6, etc...) Anything that you have laying around that is not cat 6, throw out or lock up somewhere so you don't end up with a mix and match setup. It probably wouldn't hurt to have a couple of cable testers. If you're going to do this, do it right with lots of labeling and organization.

The one "issue" that I could see coming up is that you're changing hardware, moving stuff around, and recabling. If you have a problem, which of those things caused it. If you do it all at once, it will make troubleshooting the inevitable issues more complex. It would be nice if you could make the changes separately. IE, change, move the hardware using the same cables. Make sure everything works and then change out the cables (or the other way around, whichever is easiest).

If you're buying the cable, crimper, etc, buy the tool to test the cable. It will save you a lot in the long run.

Dude.

You might want to consider SAN and a dedicated storage network/HBAs. Or iSCSI.

You can still share it over the LAN for clients it doesn't make sense to provide that connectivity to.

Hope you have a good backup strategy...

One thing I did not mention is we don't have any servers at all. It is a 100% peer to peer setup. We have 10 computers from laptops to individual workstations. The RAID devices are just network RAID storage devices. Every computer has a different function with a lot of overlap.

The main thing we want is to be able to move big monster files around. We built and delivered one file that is 32 gig. The client loved it.