Hey guys-

 

Moving my unRAID box over to a new office that has Cat6 cable run neatly into wall jacks in all the rooms. My problem is I've never seen the layout & pinout configuration I've stumbled across in this new office, and I'm unsure what pinout config to use at my starting point to feed all the the rooms correctly.

 

I have these as my termination points:

and

... which appear to be some kind of Gigamax eXtreme 6+ connection I'm unfamiliar with. The pinout it's using looks really bizarre to me.

 

Then I have these as my starting points:

and

which appear to be from a pinout of: Light Blue > Blue > Light Orange > Orange > Light Green > Green > Light Brown > Brown.... which I've NEVER seen before.

 

Am I safe to rewire my starting point cables to a T568A or T568B connector with these existing termination points? Would one be more beneficial than the other?

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

-Jon

 

An Ethernet connection can be 568a or b..  it doesn't matter, but both sides should be the same. The difference is just what color wires go to which pairs.  USUALLY the color code I see is the 568b.

  See these pictures: 

http://networking.layer-x.com/pic/fig017.gif

http://jnet99.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/t568b.jpg

 

The difference is which "pair" goes to which pins.  10/100 Ethernet uses pins 1/2 for communication in one direction, and pins 3/6 for the other, so you need to make sure that wires of the same color pairs go to those sets of pins.

 

What is convenient is that if you wire one side as 568a, and the other side as 568b, you'll see that the send and receive pairs are reversed, and so that's a good "Ethernet Crossover" if you want to wire two computers back to back without a switch (or two switches back to back)

 

In your third picture, if you have what you describe in your situation:

1: Light Blue

2: Blue

3: Light Orange

4: Orange

5: Light Green

6: Green

7: Light Brown

8: Brown

you will see that your "second pair" (3/6) is one wire each of two different colors (one orange, one green) which is called a "split pair" and wont work at all for Ethernet.  This is probably wired to use for a serial terminal or something that doesn't need the high speed data, because with the split pair, the impedance of the wire wont work for anything of Ethernet speeds.

 

Now..  For GIG Ethernet, it is the same as described above except that the pairs on 4/5 and 7/8 are used as well, AND part of the Gig-E standard states that the devices should be able to auto-switch between straight through or crossover, so even back to back, it shouldn't matter which ones are 568a or b, so long as the pairs of wire are on pins 1/2, 3/6, 4/5, and 7/8. 

 

If you're doing GigE, make sure the cable is AT LEAST Cat5e or Cat6, NOT just "cat5"

 

When you wire those jacks back together, make sure the wires stay twisted as far as possible into the jacks.  In otherwords, don't straighten out all the wires and then put them into the jacks.  You'll want the least "untwisted" wire as possible for it to work as well as possible.

 

I hope this helps.  Let me know if you need any more help. 

-Steve

 

Wow, very helpful breakdown Steve. After reading your post and doing some further investigating I was able to pull off what I learned to be a dustcover off that extreme 6+ wall connection and discovered it was 568B after all.

 

The other thing that threw me, as you figured out, was that the existing starting points must have been wired to a serial terminal and not individual jacks previously.

 

My unfamiliarity with both left me stuck in the mud. unRAID forums to the rescue once again.

 

Many thanks-

No problem..  One thing to notice is that those "Keystone" jacks you have actually have two color codes shown.. one for wiring the 568a and one for 568b.. just wanted to make sure you saw the color code. 

 

-Steve