• friend_of_satan@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I hear you, but how often have you had to swap out a cable compared to how often have you had to deal with a rats nest? This isn’t a whole lot different than zip tying groups of cables together.

    IMHO this would be even better with 6 different colors per braid. Then you could trace a cable in a few seconds while also not having a rats nest.

    Edit: oops, this was supposed to be a reply to another comment.

  • emotional_soup_88@programming.dev
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    5 days ago

    If these are UTP, I demand a screenshot of cat /proc/net/dev and of some third party packet checking software that measures crosstalk and bit error. 😂

  • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 days ago

    I actually had to teach someone in my uni course how to braid power cables for a induction motor. Do they not teach basic skills in preschool anymore?

  • Newsteinleo@infosec.pub
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    5 days ago

    God forbid you have to swap out a cable or a port does on the switch. You will spend 20 min trying to figure out what cable goes where

    • ButteryMonkey@piefed.social
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      5 days ago

      Or you could mark the bad one, replace the whole set, then unbraid and toss the marked one later in a dumb meeting you have better things to do than attend or something :p

      • Newsteinleo@infosec.pub
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        5 days ago

        You still have trace each cable between the patch panel and the switch or thing could end up on the wrong subnet.

    • socsa@piefed.social
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      5 days ago

      It still happens, the modern standards just handle these impairments better with line coding, active equalization, and more sensitive modem electronics. And obviously now we have shielding requirements in the PHY for 2.5G and above. But basically as DSP got cheaper and more compact, they were able to throw more compute at the problem which made a huge difference.

    • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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      5 days ago

      I don’t think I’ve seen a single data cable that didn’t have some kinda shielding since the early nineties.

      • rainwall@piefed.social
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        5 days ago

        Most ethernet cable is UTP, literally “unshielded twisted pair.” Shielded cable is much more expensive and less physically flexible due to the metal jackets, so people dont tend to buy it by default.

        You can argue the jacket is shielding, but mostly ethernet cable is not shielded. The braiding will cause problems, but likely very minor ones based on the length of the the run that CRC will compensate for.

          • CannonFodder@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            Yes, in theory. But in practice it depends on the frequencies.
            Even if interference is insignificant, looping the wires around a metal core (which braiding does) creates a different impedance and can degrade the signal.

              • CannonFodder@lemmy.world
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                5 days ago

                It’s the wrapping of it around a ferrite core that does it. Surprisingly little can make a difference at certain clock rates. If you take a cat5 cable running 1G and loop it a dozen times in a 6" circle and put a metal screwdriver perpendicular to the loop in its center, you will see a spike in bit errors. Weaving one wire with another isn’t going to be as strong of an effect, and it’s fiendishly complicated in terms of an e/m problem, but it could easily be significant.

        • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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          5 days ago

          Granted I’m no network engineer. But I have made many of my own cat5’s through the years and I have not seen one since I was unable to legally drive.

  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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    5 days ago

    That’s actually not that awful. Time consuming and you better not need to change the loom after it’s done, but that doesn’t become spaghetti that easily. At least not until someone adds few individual (and way too long) cables tangled to those.

    • socsa@piefed.social
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      5 days ago

      It’s awful considering braided cable sleeve is orders of magnitude cheaper than IT labor.

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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        5 days ago

        I’d guess braiding is not that much more time consuming than fighting cables in a sleeve. Personally I’d use velcro-straps, but on our team there’s always too little time to actually make things look decent, so pretty much all is in various stages of spaghetti, depending on which cabinet you’re looking for.