On 12/29/2010 9:52 AM, Blake Hudson wrote:
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [CentOS] 2 Ethernet cabling question From: Raymond Lillard ryl@sonic.net To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org Date: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 12:36:43 AM
On 12/28/2010 08:01 PM, Drew wrote:
The colors do not matter. What matters is the pairs.
And every person who comes after you will curse your work because *both* the colors *and* the pairs are part of the 568A/B standard.
In my shop if you tried that you'd be very quickly looking for work elsewhere. ;-)
Electrically it matters also. If you want to be able to have the cable usable to the full distance specified by the standard, colors matter. The reason is placement in the bundle and crosstalk between the pairs.
I concur. What some people gloss over is that not all the pairs are the same. Take an ethernet cable apart at some length greater than a few inches and you will immediately see that some pairs can have twice as many twists as another. This results in slightly different electrical and delay properties for each pair - that become exaggerated at distance. Bottom line, stick with the color scheme.
Now THAT, I did not know. I've never stripped a network cable farther than the inch or two I need in order to crimp on connectors.
And to set the record straight, I originally said that switching the color scheme (even if you keep the matched pairs), is a bad idea because it will come back to bite you (or someone else) when you have to do work on the network later. All I was saying is that it is possible to do -- not that it is a good idea.