My 1st network cable crimping job
Earlier this week, there was a power surge and my place and my machine and my sweet old hub got fried. Lucky replacing the SMPS in the box took care of it. But don’t know about my hub yet. Its a 7 year old , 16 port hub which me and all my friends have been using though out the college days.
So got frustrated to know , I could not get my laptop onto the home network. Luckily I borrowed the crimping tool from a friend and googled for cross-over crimping tutorial. After 1 hour of playing with my pen knife, the crimping tool and wasting 10 inches of cable, finally managed to get it working. Even though I have worked for more then 2 years as a sysadmin, never got around to learning crimping of network cables.
1996 : PESIT setup its 1st lan using a stack of 8 , 16 port hubs. All of the lab was connected via these hubs.
1998 : me and khorgath started doing the sysadmin work in college.
late 1999 : college decided to let go of the hubs and move the whole network to switches. And they were planning to sell off the hubs real cheap or throw them away. I managed to grab one of them before they did that.
2000-2002 : It was borrowed by all my friends and was used in every LAN party that happened. It was used in IT.com and in Banglinux. It was used in at my home once in a while. ( though nandu/sush had the hub for 90% of the time )
2003 : I setup my home network and have been using the hub for the past few months for the home network.
I’ve never bothered to learn it, myself. You are not alone, I’d say.
How times change…
I learned to make 10-base2 cables in college. But it’s been years since I cared about making any cables. It’s too easy (and cheap) to just buy a small set of ’em.
I have also never bothered to learn how to crimp – where is the tutorial?
I didn’t either until a new network point was needed one day at IoB and no one was around to do it.
It’s surprisingly easy. Put the wires in and *crimp*. Put them in at the other end in the same order and *crimp*, and you’re done! Makes one wonder how people make a living doing this.
Crimping cables is pretty easy for sure. If you do not want to do it by the standards, the color coding does not matter, only the sequence does. The real pain is maintaining the cabling in future. Apparently there is a lot of equipment available to trace cable faults etc.
yeah, knowing how to do it is diff from actually doing it. I spent most of my time trying to make those small cables straight and was trying to hold them in the right order before i can cut them and put them into the socket.
After that its easy 🙂
Re: How times change…
yeah, I have been buying cables all my life too. I gave away my last cross over to someone. We dont have Fry’s out here, so its a bit painful to drive across the town in rush hour to get anything( atleast I always avoid driving in rush hours ).
Anyway I have something like 20 2m long cables lying around, so I might as well use em 🙂
Hmmm… must give it a try with the next workstation comming in
Your senior at this
By 7 days 🙂
Yeah, holding the pieces straight is hard!
please help!
am in that problem now, kalyan. need to do a crimping test in 2 days & i just cant get to do it straight. plz help. if u can send me “how you got round it” i’d greatly appreciate.
rgds,
athanas
athanas_mwamba@yahoo.co.uk
+254722826562
Re: please help!
http://www.johnscloset.net/wiring/crossover.html
Its very simple. you just need to interchange the 4 color wires as shown in the link above.