RJ-45, cat5e
How to: Make a network cable
To my surprise, building a commercial public cloud has pushed me to learn a lot of new skills. Naive as I was, I thought “I know everything about code, the rest should be pretty easy.” Let me tell you, it is not. However, we have written a lot of internal tutorials, and I figured, why not open-source some of them? Perhaps someone else will find them useful. So here is the very first tutorial we wrote in mist-cloud.
- As with cooking, start by finding the ingredients you’ll need:
- 1 measured length of cable in the correct color
- 2 caps in the same color
- 2+ RJ-45, cat5e plugs (note how many extra you have, so you know how much to concentrate)
- 1 crimping tool
- 1 diagonal plier
- 1 cable stripper
- 1 RJ-45 cable tester
2. Now put on the caps immediately, so you don’t forget them.
3. Strip one end of the cable. The cable should be just visible on the other side of the stipper. Careful not to turn too many times, or you risk cutting the inner wires; 1.5 turns usually works. Also, cut the copper wire, and remove the metal and plastic foil.
4. Order the wires, alternating striped and solid colors. Here’s how I remember the order: Start with orange striped, then green hugs blue, then brown.
5. Once they are ordered, bend them back and forth a bit. This will help them keep their order. Also cut them down, so they are even. Then carefully slide them into the plug with the ‘clicker’ facing down.
7. Crimp the plug.
8. And put it in the cable tester, and turn it on. If anything lights up, there is a loose connection and you need to cut off the plug and redo it.
9. If nothing lights up, we slide on the cap to signal that this plug has been quality controlled.
10. Repeat steps 3–8.
11. However, before we repeat step 9 we plug in the other end of the cable into the tester. If the lights line up for 1–8, we slide on the second cap to signal that this cable has been quality controlled, and is working.
Congratulations, you have just made a network cable!
Once you’re tired of managing your network and infrastructure you should check out:
