Connecting the Wires

Another Saturday is upon us and I had a project that needed to get done.  Our new home has network cables in the walls and many rooms have a network jack ready to go.  The problem with all that is those cables didn't actually connect to anything!  In our laundry room we have a box that has all of our network/phone/cable/satellite cables, a lot I know.  So today was the day to change all that.  My dad graciously came over to help me out as he has a lot of experience having wired their home.

The box that was installed doesn't have electricity and if we were going to connect the network together it needed a switch which needed to be powered.  After a quick trip to Home Depot, we had the necessary electrical wires, box, outlet, and screws to get everything in place.  The box was removed to and we drilled a hole through a stud and tapped into the breaker box to give us power to the electrical outlet.  It was nice because we didn't need to remove any drywall which was something we had been dreading.  I don't have an original photo with the wires in the box but it was a mess.  Essentially all the wires you see in the picture below were just all smashed in the box.  We cleaned it up a lot.

With the outlet in place all that was left was to put the connector ends on the cables and plug in the switch.  The trick with Cat5 Ethernet cables is that there are two types, a normal Ethernet cable and a crossover cable.  In a crossover cable the wires at the end are wired differently and we needed them to match to get a normal Ethernet cable.  I unscrewed the plate under my computer and looked at how it was wired.  We decided it was a type B cable and so we wired accordingly which is White-Orange/Orange/White-Green/Blue/White-Blue/Green/White-Brown/Brown, just in case you wanted to know.

Every cable needed to be wired as such and with that done we simply needed to plug it all in and clean up.  Testing all the ports showed that we did it right and firing up the Xbox gave me an open NAT.  I am very pleased.  I've had a Moderate NAT forever since I was sharing Internet from my laptop to the Xbox but now it has a direct connection!  Awesome.  This house just gets better and better.  Thanks to my dad who, once again, had all the tools and know-how to get the job done quickly and right.

First make it possible.  Then make it beautiful.  Then make it fast.

Eric