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Tracking realtime status of ports?

Kelemvor

Kelemvor

Lifer
At work we have lots of conference rooms that have to have their active ports moved around quite a bit. Sometime ports just need to be turned on/off. Sometimes it needs to go from being a LAN to a Modem. Etc.

What ideas do you have on how to have something so that you could walk into the server closet (or look at something online) and be able to see which ports are active and which are phones vs LAN jacks etc.

We have the conference service peopel who do the room setups and isntead of them having to walk around and test every port to see what on, we want to have some way that they can look at something to see what already turned on and what status it's in.

Only thing I've come up with is a dry erase board that we'd put each room's layout on and color the ports to designate what's a LAN and what's a phone and what's just not hooked up at all. We also thought of a spreadsheet to maintain but that'd be lots of work and involve finding a PC to look things up.

And of course the ports on the rooms aren't always in numerical order so just looking at the racks doesn't help either.

Just looking for a nice, pretty, easy way we can designate which ports are which so people can know where to plug in instead of plugging in somewhere else and then telling us we need to go turn a jack on.
 
Remember, or do the following:

Look at number on the wall of the socket, go to server room, and look for the colour of the cable that is plugged in.

Blue = Network
Yellow = Digital Voice
Green = Analog Voice/Modem
etc etc

Short of having a list somewhere that documents what each port is, and having it regularly updated, colour coding your network cables makes things much easier. At one site (my site, of course :roll: ) we've got blue cables for everything. Digital voice, analogue voice/modems, LAN, DECnet etc. At the newest site (which opened up last year) we use the colour scheme I suggested above, and you can instantly see what type of connection is set up on each port.


Confused
 
FrankyJunior, keep data and phone jacks separate - color coding will accomplish this. Then buy a bunch of cheap managed switches (e.g., Dell) and terminate *every* data jack into a managed switch port once. Do similarly with phone jacks and a phone system. Then it's all software and VLANs to move where a port connects - or to disable/enable the port.

Get out of the business of moving wires around.
 
Originally posted by: cmetz
FrankyJunior, keep data and phone jacks separate - color coding will accomplish this. Then buy a bunch of cheap managed switches (e.g., Dell) and terminate *every* data jack into a managed switch port once. Do similarly with phone jacks and a phone system. Then it's all software and VLANs to move where a port connects - or to disable/enable the port.

Get out of the business of moving wires around.
Click to expand...

yeah, all network ports should be wired and color coded with some sort of ICON (the jacks have little computers on them)
 
Originally posted by: Confused
Remember, or do the following:

Look at number on the wall of the socket, go to server room, and look for the colour of the cable that is plugged in.

Blue = Network
Yellow = Digital Voice
Green = Analog Voice/Modem
etc etc

Short of having a list somewhere that documents what each port is, and having it regularly updated, colour coding your network cables makes things much easier. At one site (my site, of course :roll: ) we've got blue cables for everything. Digital voice, analogue voice/modems, LAN, DECnet etc. At the newest site (which opened up last year) we use the colour scheme I suggested above, and you can instantly see what type of connection is set up on each port.


Confused
Click to expand...


Heh great if the cabling doods were any use at thier job i have the same prob as you 🙂

Every single patch cable in my company is grey and yes its a total nightmare and i want to shoot the guy that did it 🙂

gotta love inheritance 😡

what makes matters worse is they pulled the VOIP into the same panels as the cat5 and there is nothing on the panels to say what is VOIP terminate and what is data 🙂 muhahhaha love it 🙂
 
Same here. In the old section of the building there are different colored jacks in each wall plate. However there aren't enough ports on the switches to have them all active at once so we have to connect and disconnect things as they are needed elsewhere.

In the main part of the building, there might be enough ports to have them all actiev, but they are all red jacks in the rooms so there's no way to distinguish what's what unless you go into the closet, trace the cable and see where it goes.

We are currently getting some other colored cables to use to hook up for modem ports and such but we are looking for a way that the peopel setting up the rooms can know what's active and what's not. And we don't want them going into the closets and messing with cables because thatwould just be bad.
 
Same here. In the old section of the building there are different colored jacks in each wall plate. However there aren't enough ports on the switches to have them all active at once so we have to connect and disconnect things as they are needed elsewhere.
Click to expand...

That's ridiculous. Get another switch.

For the labor of moving cables around you've already bought a 50,000 dollar switch.
 
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