Brian Seitz

January 27, 2012

Objectives: In this lab, I made a straight through cable, a crossover cable, looked at Thinnet and Thicknet and connected a cable to a patch panel using a punch-down tool.

Equipment list: Stripper, 2 RJ-45 connectors, CAT5 UTP cable, a simple network system, patch panel and a punch-down tool.

Notes and Observations: Although I had never done any of this kind of stuff before, it wasn’t all that difficult. My biggest problem was that I have pretty decent sized hands, so messing with the tiny wires sometimes gave me trouble. Especially when I had to put them in a certain order for the straight through and crossover cables. My straight through and crossover cables worked but when I connected my a cable to the patch panel, my side didn’t work. It turns out, I just had the solid and striped wires mixed up. You’d think they would be pretty easy to tell but since whoever made the wires used clear instead of white, it was kind of hard to tell which one was which. That was the only trouble I really ran into with this lab. Overall, I thought this lab was pretty interesting and useful. We also compared Thinnet and Thicknet.

Questions: For a little bit after I had connected a cable to the patch panel, I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work. “Did I wire it wrong?” “Are the wires down far enough?” What I really should have been asking myself was, “Are your solids and stripes mixed up?”. It turns out they were.