North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Cable Colors

  • From: Owen DeLong
  • Date: Tue Jun 17 02:01:31 2008
I work around the mess issue by stocking in 1/2 foot increments. Sure you sometimes
get a little extra at the ends, but, with a maximum of 6" extra to deal with, it's usually
not much of a mess and can mostly be absorbed within the width of the vertical and
height of the horizontal cable managers at each end.

Yes, it's a wee bit more expensive.

In long term deployments, custom-cut to length on site might make sense, but, I work
in dynamic and changing environments where a given cable's life-span varies
unpredictably between a few days and several years. In that environment, cut-to-
length requires more staff and cost than my budget allows.

Velcro cable wraps are your friend and the pre-printed serial/length labels at each
end help a lot in the long run, too.

Owen

On Jun 16, 2008, at 5:15 PM, Martin Hannigan wrote:


This seems like a good demarcation for the colors, but two things. Its a bit more expensive, and, it typically makes for a pretty mess. You're talking pre determined cable lengths for the most part. I tend to avoid patch cables like the plague and invest in long term deployments cut to length.

Intelligently strapping in mostly permanent wiring should be worth the investment and reduce outages in the long run. The colors don't hurt.

Best,

Marty




----- Original Message -----
From: Owen DeLong <[email protected]>
To: Glenn Sieb <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon Jun 16 22:56:45 2008
Subject: Re: Cable Colors

I don't know of any hard standard in use anywhere. I've generally taken
to the following:

Green == low-bandwidth straigh-through
	Telephone, T1, Serial, etc.
Purple == Roll Cables (almost always serial, sometimes telecom)
	(8-1 7-2 6-3 5-4 4-5 3-6 2-7 1-8)
Orange(C) == EIA-568b cross-over cable (ethernet xover)
Orange(F) == Multimode Fiber
Yellow(F) == Singlemode Fiber
White == Clear (inside VPN concentrator network)
Black == Crypt (Outside VPN concentrator network)
Blue == Publicly accessible networks
Red == Backend (usually OOB management) networks
Pink == KVM (KVM switch <-> Dongle)

Occasionally I encounter needs for greater specificity, but, these
usually do most of what I need.

I'm sure others use entirely different choices.

Owen