North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Cable Colors

  • From: Steve Bertrand
  • Date: Tue Jun 17 01:02:33 2008
David Coulson wrote:
Steve Bertrand wrote:
LOL, simplicity via obscurity at its finest ;)

Colour coding works great, and it's easy to follow. Then there is that issue that pops up where *that* cable over there will work!

90% of our movable cable patches (aka stuff that is not hard wired into a patch panel) are less than three feet long and are totally enclosed within individual racks (e.g. server to top of rack switch, switch to patch panel, other side of patch panel to core) - Each end of the cable is labeled, so it's pretty easy to trace it.

Labeling is good. As I've tried to follow the pace of this thread, I appreciate where someone else stated that (paraphrased) "males essentially have a problem with identifying colours". I personally am relatively colour blind (mostly red-orange are the same, as is black-green).

I care more about cable management when you have something like a 6513 with a bunch of 48 port Ethernet blades. Not figured out a way to deal with that which doesn't look like complete crap - Doesn't matter what color they are. The vertical 7600s/6509-VE models are nice, but of course, we don't have those :)

A very good friend of mine who is relatively quite older than I, used to run what we (I) would call now the 'IT' department in the Butterfield Bank of Bermuda way back years ago (relative), showed me pictures of closets which had numerous hundreds of Token Ring MAU connectors, attached to cabling dozens of feet long stretched down a corridor 100' at least after an effort to 'untangle' the typical 'this needs to be patched *to this floor*'.

I will forever remember those pictures, and forever know that no matter how badly labeled/coloured an Ethernet infrastructure environment is, it can never be as bad as having several hundreds of cables as thick as my baby finger, all the same colour, entangled in a mess worse than anything I've seen.

I would like to know ANYONE who has a policy strict enough, and enforces it so as to have even an almost perfect cabling infrastructure...is there such a thing?

God bless CATx cable, especially when it terminates within the same area that it originates from ;)

Steve