Anyone run Cat5 or Cat6 to their shop?

[Matt Meiser]

Right or wrong, the way I wired my house is to run homeruns from all the rooms back to a network closet in the basement. The rooms have keystone jacks. I'd like to have run them to a patch panel in the basement but at the time they were pretty expensive, plus all the patch cords I would have needed would have added even more. So I installed a RJ45 jack on that end. Someday (TM) I will change them out for a patch panel. But in practice it works just fine. I only have a 100MBPS switch and it might be different if it was 1GBPS. Each room has a blue and white jack. White is phone, blue is ethernet. Except my office which has 6 blue and 2 white.

Everything is RJ45 so I can turn a port into phone or ethernet if needed by just moving the cable from a small surplus patch panel I found to use as a "phone hub" to the switch or vise-versa.

[paul cottingham]

Sorry, I can get pretty pedantic about this. The way you have wired that will eventually fail, but subtly at first. clients will start getting dhcp leases slower, dns will resolve slower or not at all, and you will have trouble pinpointing why. This is true even at 100 Mbit.

I just can't help myself, its like people who can't leave threads alone that comment on table saw safety.

btW I never use a pushstick.

J/K, I use a grripper.

[Warren Johnson]

Matt,

Buy a blank patch panel and bracket. You install your RJ - 45 female jack's into the panel as you go along. You already have the jacks on the ends of the cables, so the cost should be under $40.00 for a panel and bracket. Mount it close to the equipment in your closet and buy some short patch cables. You should be able to find some that 1 foot long. That should allow you to keep everything neat.

[paul cottingham]

+1 to that.

[Matt Meiser]

OK, you've convinced me. Looking around they've come down quite a bit in price. When I looked at doing patch panels/cords before it was going to be really expensive. Patch panels were $100 and up used at the time. Cables were a couple bucks each. But they have come down quite a bit in price so I just ordered some of the 12-port vertical patch panels. I chose those because they'll be easier to mount in my situation than buying the 19" rack style and a bracket. Now is a good time because I need to do some changes on the phone side and run wiring to the attached garage where the conduit from the shop will be coming in. Monoprice has cables ridiculously cheap and I've had good luck with them.

[paul cottingham]

Don't forget to check electrical wholesalers...they often will deal with walk-ins and are much cheaper. Also, make sure the panel matches whatever standard (568A or B) that you used n the jacks.

[Dennis McGarry]

OK, you've convinced me. Looking around they've come down quite a bit in price. When I looked at doing patch panels/cords before it was going to be really expensive. Patch panels were $100 and up used at the time. Cables were a couple bucks each. But they have come down quite a bit in price so I just ordered some of the 12-port vertical patch panels. I chose those because they'll be easier to mount in my situation than buying the 19" rack style and a bracket. Now is a good time because I need to do some changes on the phone side and run wiring to the attached garage where the conduit from the shop will be coming in. Monoprice has cables ridiculously cheap and I've had good luck with them.

Matt if you need one, I have a couple extra 48 port siemons patch panels. If you want one just let me know and cover shipping and its yours..

Dennis

[Matt Meiser]

The patch panels I bought work for either standard, as do the jacks I used. I just have to pull one and check which I used.

Dennis, thanks for the offer--If I hadn't ordered that many ports worth already I definitely would have taken you up on it!

And no, I don't have 48 ports in my house. I'll use 12 as a hub for phone wiring and have about 20 or so ports scattered around. I ordered one extra for future

I've currently use two of these little 6-port Leviton patch panels as a phone hub because I got them for a couple bucks each at one of the big box stores on clearance. Those will get moved to either end of the conduit to my shop to provide for transitioning between the wire and fiber converters and for the phone wiring. I've got a couple nice enclosures I bought a while back that will work nicely for holding everything.