Re: Cable Management vs. Easy Maintenance

mchilders@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
RC wrote:
I don't think he's talking about moving drops, but changing the patch cables
so that a jack that was on a non-PoE switch would be moved to a PoE switch
when the phone is moved.


Thanks for the replies, but RC is correct. I can explain it a little
bit better... typically we have about 3-7 drops per classroom. Each
classroom also has 1 phone. So per classroom we need one PoE switch
port and between 2 and 6 regular switch ports. When a teacher decides
that they to rearrange their room and want their phone on the other
side of the classroom and thier network printer where their phone was,
we have to go into the closet, track down the port that the phone will
be moving to and make sure it is connected to a powered switch, as well
as removing the printer's port from a powered switch to a regular
switch. It gets really hectic when we are opening a new school and all
the teachers desk are set by the moving company, and all the phones and
computers are placed by someone else. Then the first day of school,
all the teachers come along and rearrange and we have to completely
redo the entire wiring of the closet to make sure all the phones will
work.

No real easy answer beyond using all PoE, which as you said is often cost
prohibitive.

When I mix PoE and non-PoE I color code the patch cables. My personal
"standard"
Yellow=straight-through Ethernet
Red=cross-over Ethernet
Blue=PoE
Green=ISDN-BRI
Grey=T1 or PRI

I've considered using a color code, but that still really doesn't help
on tracking down the regular cables that have to be switched with the
powered ones... Especially if you have a nice cable management with
all your cables neatly velcroed or cable tied. :-)

Someone did email me saying I could look into powered patch panels,
which I had never heard of before, but I'm afraid that solution would
probably be almost as pricey as using all powered switches.

And their may not be a good solution for this other that all PoE
switches. I'm kind of a stickler for good cable management, and
everytime we start getting moves like this the closets start looking
like spider webs.

Thanks for the input,
Matt

"Perkowski" <perkowski1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:o1Txg.2664$Wi.299@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ok, let me ask you this? Why not just leave the old drop in its original
location and add a new one for the phone's new location?

How many MACs do you have a month? 95% of the K-12 I worked in would have
us (cabling contractor) run a new drop to the new location, while leaving
the old drop intact.

Thing is if you want to use the same drop to move to a different rack
where
your PoE switches are, you could run into a lot problems. For example not
enough service loop to reach new rack, disrupting 110 terminations on old
rack when pulling out cable, etc.

Personally, it makes more sense to add a new drop in my opinion.

Perkowski

<mchilders@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1153929427.477089.211060@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I work for a school district that is in the process of bringing on 3
new schools, one of which is a high school with several hundred drops
per closet. We use IP telephony and all phones in the district are
powered via Power over Ethernet. The issue that we are facing is that
due to the cost of PoE switches, we can only afford to put in PoE ports
for the number of phones that we have, the rest of the drops connect to
non-powered switches. I would like for these closets to have all patch
cables neatly arranged and bundled from the panel to the switches
running through vertical and horizontal cable managers. The issue we
then run into is that once we get a closet all looking good, phones
begin to move and cables that were previously plugged into non-powered
switches need to be moved to a PoE switch, which requires tracing down
a cable through all these bundles of cable management just to move it
to the PoE switch.

My initial thought was to just label all of the patch cables as to
which drop they connect to on the panel, but with several hundred
cables it takes just as long if not longer to find the cable labeled P4
D17 as it does to just trace it down. My other thoughts would be color
coding the labels so that a color represents either a certain patch
panel or a group of 24 or 48 ports. That way if you knew the cable was
on panel 2 (green), then you'd only be looking for green labels to find
the right cable.

After thinking about this, I know that several of you already know what
works and what doesn't work because you work with this stuff on a daily
basis and have seen installations 10x the size of ours. So if any of
you have any suggestions as to what works and what doesn't, I'd love to
hear it.

Thanks for your help,
Matt

If I was designing network for a school, I would have a patch panel and hub in each classroom. Feeding the class room from a more traditional wiring closet someplace I'd have four or so UTP cables going to the patch panel in the room, and pull in a couple strands of fiber for future use.
Bring in one poe line for the phone from the wiring closet, on the telephone subnet, and normal data line which feeds a N port hub for the classroom. If you only need a teachers computer and a printer, then one of those cheapie 4 port hubs would be fine. Need to support a connection for each student, put in a 24 or so port hub. Make the POE patch cable a different color, and the POE telephone uplink port appear different on the label. (color and symbology) This empoweres the clueful teachers to rearrange their rooms the way they want without having to call you to do the change. This also gets the teachers to help each other out, rather than having to depend on a tech to come out for every piddling little change, which makes nobody happey.

--Dale
.

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