May 09, 2003
Ripping old cables
Everyone knows you run Ethernet over fiber or cat-5 unshielded twisted pair. Unless you're old and have been running wire for a while. To the left you see a standard 4-pair cat-5 cable, stripped to view the four pairs of 24 gauge solid copper wire. About a quarter inch diameter, flexible, easy to work with and terminate using little RJ-48 modular plugs and jacks barely larger than telephone plugs and jacks.
Below is a stripped back AUI transceiver cable. Still four pairs, but thicker, stranded wire, each pair wrapped with a metalic-mylar ground with a bare ground wire, all four pairs wrapped in mylar, the whole mess covered with braided shield, all encased in a suitable plastic jacket. The connector used with this cable is a shielded db-15 -- the same as used for a PC's joystick port.
Hacked and ripped and removed from the cable rack where the Cabletron MMAC-plus's used to sit. Six chopped off where they enter the duct to the next room. One disconnected from the vampire tap to the 10base5 thicknet backbone cable. I'll take that out next week -- using it to pull a rope thru the ducts between the first and second floors.
Posted by at May 9, 2003 09:03 PM