After a year or more of constant changes to the home rack, the wiring started to look ugly and not presentable. If my lab is something I take pride on, then something had to change. Current wiring looked a bit like this:
The idea was not only to rework the cables so they’re a bit more presentable, but also to start a color standard for patch cables within the rack itself:
- Blue: VLAN Trunks (Data + iSCSI)
- Black: Native Data/Voice
- Red: iSCSI / NFS
- Orange: Internet Uplinks
- Yellow: Management (iLO/IPMI)
Also, the cables that are going up to the office and to the TV’s and media rack were all loose and just crimped at the end. Time to get serious, take advantage of this rewiring and put a patch panel so it all looks cleaner.
I started by removing all cables and leaving only those that will go in the panel, then toning them down and use some labels.
Punched the pairs into the panel, and racked it in between the core and access switches (so i could patch into core or access with a short patch and no “skipping over”).
CLEAN!
Moved some things around so the Comcast/AT&T modems go in between instead of the side, and also fitted the Sophos UTM.
Meanwhile, the whole rest of the room looked like a total mess.
New cables start to go in…
Not too happy with the C-shape of those Orange cables, and wish I had gotten a couple 1ft instead. For now, meh…
And by Sunday morning, this is what is all looked like.
