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How can you detect an intermittently faulty jack?

J

JohnnyMCE

Member
So i posted on here recently asking how to set up static ip's in a router. After 2 trips to the site and over 9 hours of testing and configuring I thought everything worked perfect (i even worked with the tech support to verify I did everything correctly) the network worked fine. The next day the office could not get online again. The ISP sent a tech out and the problem was apparently an intermittently faulty jack that the ISP had originally run that was placed right before the router.

I want to know how could have detected that the jack was intermittently faulty. Everything is fine now but i want to learn in case I run into this again in the future.
 
Honestly, the only way to know for sure is to scan the link and channel with a very expensive cable certifier - 4000 dollars or more. When troubleshooting the first place to look is physical layer and one of the first things to do is scan/certify the cabling.
 
spidey07 said:
Honestly, the only way to know for sure is to scan the link and channel with a very expensive cable certifier - 4000 dollars or more. When troubleshooting the first place to look is physical layer and one of the first things to do is scan/certify the cabling.
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I appreciate the info. The ISP swore up and down that their equipment was fine that their adtran in the closet was perfect as was the cabling they ran to the jack and that they could see the router I had sitting behind the jack perfectly fine.

The issue was either the cable they ran, the jack they used or how they set either of those items up. My biggest mistake was assuming all the ISP equipment was fine because I went through the router, switch and the rest of the network (aka all the other equipment I had set up) with a fine tooth comb.
 
I've had intermittently faulty jacks in offices before. So far, they've always been caused by hand-crimped RJ45 male connectors some place in the cabling.
 
Old school but send a lot of continuous traffic over the suspected connection and have someone wiggle and shake the cables and connectors while monitoring the output.

Not perfect, but free 🙂
 
There's some pretty decent companies out there that rent the equipment you need on a weekly basis. Check around on google.

You're probably looking at around $300 / wk for a suitable fluke (or other brand) scanner. They should provide all the paperwork re. calibration etc. for the equipment also.

It's a decent way to have access to this sort of equipment if you don't have the up front finances to afford purchase and are only going to be needing to use it every so often.
 
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