Help figuring out a network box in my apartment

[dawheat]

Sorry for the call for help, but I have no idea what to do here. Basically I ignored the ethernet jacks in my apartment as my office was near the TV and I was able to either wire everything up or use wireless. However with a baby on the way, I've been forced to move my office stuff into a bedroom and there's no way to run a normal cable from the living room (where the Fios router (set as a bridge) and Apple Airport Extreme are.

So throughout my apartment are jack points which have two ethernet plugs - a red and green one. There is one next to the TV and another in the bedroom (along with others).

In the closet is this network box which has a bunch of coax cables and two different set of labeled cables. There are white cables (labelled for example bedroom right, living room ,etc) that are plugged into the green and red jacks in the picture. There are then blue ethernet cables coming out of the wall that are also identically labelled (e.g. bedroom right, living room) that are not plugged into anything.

Unfortunately there aren't any electrical outlets in the closet (though if push comes to shove I can figure something out - like a powered hub).

Any help deciphering what's going on here would be greatly appreciated.

 

[azazel1024]

Are you sure that the jacks are RJ45? Or are they RJ11 in the rooms? The board where everything is plugged in in your picture looks like a nice phone bus. Supposing the cables are wired to RJ45 ends properly, you could probably stick them and the white ones in to a network switch and be good to go.

 

[dawheat]

Thanks azazel1024 - I don't know how they're wired, but I have some spare stuff I can try and see if it picks up a connection. However, do you mind being a little more basic with me?

So if I take a cable from my router in the living room and plug it into say the red outlet, then would I take the corresponding white cable in the picture (that's labelled living room and plugged into the red jack) and put it into a switch?

Then take say the white cable in the picture (that's labelled bedroom and plugged into a red jack) and also put it into the switch?

Then ideally I plug my computer in the bedroom into the red wall jack?

Any idea what those other blue cables are for and why they're labelled identically?

 

[kevnich2]

Can you take a better pic of the right side, where the cross connect type wiring is? From the looks of these, their all wired in sequence which means they're all wired for phone. Though it would be easy to unplug them from those jacks and then simply connect them to an ethernet switch. You would need power though to do that.

If this is correct and you're not using any phone, you'd simply unplug all the white cables from the jacks and plug all of them into one network switch. Then at one of the jack points in one of the rooms, connect a LAN port on the back of your router to the jack and once you verify you have connectivity, all the other jacks should now be live with ethernet/network.

Take a count of ALL of the jacks in all your rooms. Most likely the blue ones are going to jacks, they just were never plugged into anything so if you can figure out what jacks go to the blue cables, you can use those for your data instead.

 

[dawheat]

And you guys were right - this ended up being way easier than expected. I simply plugged the blue cables into a switch and with a little trial and error to figure out which outlet those cables corresponded to, got it to work (had a 50:50 chance).

Simply ran a cable from my router into the correct wall jack, and another cable from my computer in the other room to the correct wall jack.

Can't believe I didn't use this for so long. Thanks all.

 

[JackMDS]

Glad you made it.

That said, if you have more issues this Gizmo make it very simple.

http://www.amazon.com/HDE-HDE-H11-Ne...s_7701919011_1

P.S., a real pro Ethernet tester cost hundreds of $$ but for simple ID purposes the above would do.