Cleaning up the office server rack
Ok, so I will be the first to admit I am a coder. I make a pretty good sys-admin too. But I have never declared myself to be a network engineer or whatever the heck I need to be to know the correct way to wire a rack.
What I do know is that when we switched offices last year we got into one that had a rack already mounted in the corner of the storage room. So we put it to use and mounted all our phone and Ethernet blocks and wiring harnesses and such to it. It started off looking pretty clean, but as time has gone on and I have expanded our office it has gotten pretty scary looking.
So we just got a new server and I want to stick it in the rack, but looking at the spaghetti wiring is making me dizzy. I need to clean up a bit. So it takes me back to the beginning of the entry. I have a couple really stupid questions.
1. The first is, can I cut the cables to length? I remember something my college physics about length of cable and wavelengths and crap. Does that apply here?
2. Does it really matter if phone lines are bundled with phone lines and Ethernet with Ethernet?
Does anybody have any tips for cleaning up? Because its gonna be me and some cable cutters and some zip ties here in a bit if someone can’t put me on the right path.
31 Jul 2007 Simeon
Since you can run phone over cat 5 I don’t think it matters. But I would get a bunch of those velcro stickum things because they are much easier to undo than zip ties.
Gonna have to give a nod to Jen. Go with velcro. Or clips. Or rubber bands. No matter how careful you are about organizing everything, there will inevitably be something that needs to change. Zip ties are as close as you can get to permanent without using a hot glue gun.
Because I abhor clutter, I cut almost all of my cables to length. It’s easy to do and you can buy an entire kit at Best Buy (or similar). I can’t speak to wavelengths or frequency ranges, but I’ll offer my “expert” assessment: It seems to work just peachy.
thanks gang,
I appreciate the feedback. I have the crimper and a box of cable and Ethernet ends, so now its just I just need a weekend when I can tear out all the existing stuff and start to cut cables
I’m not sure if there is an ‘official’ min length - I’ve seen all sorts of figures - depending on if it’s 10 or 100, etc. Phone it doesn’t matter. Cable is cheap enough - you can experiement. I used to have some pretty short cables (less than 2ft) and never had issues…
The way I had my rack wired was to have all Ethernet wired into one patch panel, all phone wired into another - and then all wall jacks wired into a third panel. Then using patch cords I could connect anything to anything, and keep things fairly neat. If you get different colored cable - that can also help - blue=eth, red=crossover, yellow=phone, etc.
I’d also recommend velcro - if you have a wiring/IT shop near you they have lots of wire management stuff for racks that can make your life a lot easier.