So here's the deal (and i apologize in advance for the horrificly long post); i work at a relatively small school district (5 schools) that qualifies for very few external funding opportunites like grants, e-rate, etc. so most everything has always been done in house. including wiring. and termination. and it's NOT pretty.
go back a 2 years, and you'd find a network being run by a former teacher, who although a nice guy, had next to no practical training in computers or networking. when a drop needed to be added, it was pulled by maintenance... and when a cable wasn't long enough, each wire was untwisted about 2", and was spliced onto another cat 5 cable that was untwisted about 2" - so yes, 4" of untwist is not uncommon on some of our runs. one of our schools has an mdf, and no idf's. a dozen runs atleast must be quite a ways over 300 ft at this school alone. anyways, all of this worked fine on their, wait for it....
network of 10 base-t asante hubs, and breezecom wireless bridges. and that's all. this was a completely routerless setup, sans the cisco 2600 series that the county installed for our T-1. a dhcp server was in use... serving out real world addresses. of course there were more computers than available addresses in our subnet at the time, so there was always a guessing game as to wether or not a staff member would be able to use the internet or check email on any given day.
fast forward to today, and there are two of us network/computer guys that are very knowledgable, and have worked in the technology in education for a while now. the hubs are gone, 10 Mb switches are in their place, there's a properly setup router at each site, breezecom radios have given way to cisco aeronet's, etc. however, maintenance is still doing their own thing with wiring. we have a problem with 4" of untwisted wire and jumpered/spliced connections, as the places where we've tried some 100 megabit equiptment we've only seen about 40-60 Mb/s worth of throughput, and enough errors that the switches have shut off the ports.
what we need, is some hard specs, outlining the 100m rule, the 13mm of untwisted wire rule, the don't splice rule... all of the things we tech people take for granted, and simply refer to as things you can't do because it's out of spec.... i need to find irrefutable references to these specs, listing what they can and can't do, and showing the reasons why the need to stick to spec. we've tried speaking with them, but the only response we've seen so far, is 'that's how we've always done it, and it's always worked'. we would very much like to actually step out of the antiquated 10 megabit world, but our current wiring isn't going to do it, which we can cope with and work around. but there's just no reason for new wiring to be done this way, and we have to have documentation to back up our complaints.
can you help me? have any of you faced similar situations? any and all suggestions and comments are welcome.
thanks
go back a 2 years, and you'd find a network being run by a former teacher, who although a nice guy, had next to no practical training in computers or networking. when a drop needed to be added, it was pulled by maintenance... and when a cable wasn't long enough, each wire was untwisted about 2", and was spliced onto another cat 5 cable that was untwisted about 2" - so yes, 4" of untwist is not uncommon on some of our runs. one of our schools has an mdf, and no idf's. a dozen runs atleast must be quite a ways over 300 ft at this school alone. anyways, all of this worked fine on their, wait for it....
network of 10 base-t asante hubs, and breezecom wireless bridges. and that's all. this was a completely routerless setup, sans the cisco 2600 series that the county installed for our T-1. a dhcp server was in use... serving out real world addresses. of course there were more computers than available addresses in our subnet at the time, so there was always a guessing game as to wether or not a staff member would be able to use the internet or check email on any given day.
fast forward to today, and there are two of us network/computer guys that are very knowledgable, and have worked in the technology in education for a while now. the hubs are gone, 10 Mb switches are in their place, there's a properly setup router at each site, breezecom radios have given way to cisco aeronet's, etc. however, maintenance is still doing their own thing with wiring. we have a problem with 4" of untwisted wire and jumpered/spliced connections, as the places where we've tried some 100 megabit equiptment we've only seen about 40-60 Mb/s worth of throughput, and enough errors that the switches have shut off the ports.
what we need, is some hard specs, outlining the 100m rule, the 13mm of untwisted wire rule, the don't splice rule... all of the things we tech people take for granted, and simply refer to as things you can't do because it's out of spec.... i need to find irrefutable references to these specs, listing what they can and can't do, and showing the reasons why the need to stick to spec. we've tried speaking with them, but the only response we've seen so far, is 'that's how we've always done it, and it's always worked'. we would very much like to actually step out of the antiquated 10 megabit world, but our current wiring isn't going to do it, which we can cope with and work around. but there's just no reason for new wiring to be done this way, and we have to have documentation to back up our complaints.
can you help me? have any of you faced similar situations? any and all suggestions and comments are welcome.
thanks
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