Debian Basement
Sunday, December 30th, 2007My wife is a pretty good paintress and for Xmas painted a Debian logo at the wall of my basement terminal room. Now that’s comfy. ![]()
My wife is a pretty good paintress and for Xmas painted a Debian logo at the wall of my basement terminal room. Now that’s comfy. ![]()
I must admit it: when it comes to OSI layer 1 I plain suck. We built a house and the most important thing of course is making it get a proper structured cabling. (I assume that some freaks invented the cryptic number EN 50173-1 for it so they wifes don’t discover what useless thing they spend their money on.) Thanks to the generous loan of a coworker I could test my new patch panel and the sound of that centuries old device when displaying FAIL sounds like the ringtone of Marvin from the Hitchhiker’s guide. I can still hear my friend who helped me set up that cabling and milling slashes into the wall… “Don’t make the cable hanging out of the wall too long or it won’t fit in there when the wall will be concealed.” So the CAT6 cable was just 10cm short which makes it close to impossible to get that wires into a network jack in the wall. The first 8 jacks were hard… just the last one worked at once. Telegärtner are easy to get into the wall but try to get the 16 wires through the back of the jack without selling your soul. AMP jacks are hard to install into the wall (the song “if I had a hammer” came to my mind) but at least my LSA+ tool easily made it connect the wires. Just don’t make me start about the minimal bending radius. That jack hardly fits into the wall even when the CAT6 cable is creased pretty badly. I don’t know which optimist wrote that specification but if you intend to install network jacks into your house your best bet is to just use an LSA+ tool to connect the wires and use extreme force to press the jack into the wall. If your network tester tells you that you have short-circuited wires then you likely have squeezed wires into the metal casing when tightening the screws (shame on you). Otherwise if the wiremap is just b0rked then check the cabling at your patch panel. Connecting those 9 jacks made me have nightmares about that. Now that everything works I think I’ll try to never touch OSI layer 1 again.