unpopular opinion:
The effort of “tidying up” cables is never worth it.
You’ll always end up having to change something and your sophisticated cable management turns a 5 minute job into a 1 hour job, as you open zip ties and dig out cables.
Just plug that shit in, label both ends with numbered tape, and let it look messy.The first step is using correctly sized ethernet cables. Dont use a 12 ft cable for a 3 ft run. There shouldnt be more than a foot of slack in general. You dont need to “tidy” excess you dont have.
Then, for when you do need to tidy cables, use velcro ties, not zip ties.
I hear you, but how often have you had to swap out a cable compared to how often have you had to deal with a rats nest? This isn’t a whole lot different than zip tying groups of cables together.
IMHO this would be even better with 6 different colors per braid. Then you could trace a cable in a few seconds while also not having a rats nest.
Edit: oops, this was supposed to be a reply to another comment.
You could also use tape tags on the ends, either color or number codes. Just mark both ends of each cable.
I actually had to teach someone in my uni course how to braid power cables for a induction motor. Do they not teach basic skills in preschool anymore?
They only teach girls how to braid in pre school then ostracise them out of becoming power techs.
God forbid you have to swap out a cable or a port does on the switch. You will spend 20 min trying to figure out what cable goes where
Or you could mark the bad one, replace the whole set, then unbraid and toss the marked one later in a dumb meeting you have better things to do than attend or something :p
You still have trace each cable between the patch panel and the switch or thing could end up on the wrong subnet.
Sure, a long as those cables are shielded. Crosstalk was a real thing “back in my day”.
I don’t think I’ve seen a single data cable that didn’t have some kinda shielding since the early nineties.
Most ethernet cable is UTP, literally “unshielded twisted pair.” Shielded cable is much more expensive and less physically flexible due to the metal jackets, so people dont tend to buy it by default.
You can argue the jacket is shielding, but mostly ethernet cable is not shielded. The braiding will cause problems, but likely very minor ones based on the length of the the run that CRC will compensate for.
Exactly the first thought I had, fellow old-timer.
IT with an E
That’s actually not that awful. Time consuming and you better not need to change the loom after it’s done, but that doesn’t become spaghetti that easily. At least not until someone adds few individual (and way too long) cables tangled to those.
Uncommon
