Structuring the Structured Cabling

Saturday, November 01, 2008

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We talked about structured cabling and its several offerings many times in our magazine. This time we are going to talk about something different - how to efficiently plan and troubleshoot structured cabling. This component of our network is silently hidden behind the walls, but a majority of network troubles and downtime is caused by faulty cables and patch panels, patch cords, etc. As these are hidden and jumbled up across the space, spotting errors in them, identifying and pinpointing problems is a nightmare for Network Admins.

Let's discuss some dominant technologies and applications which can help plan your cabling better, identify and fix errors.

Planning your structured Cabling
Planning a structured cabling deployment or its updation is a very technical task and requires years of experience. The trouble increases with the size of the network and types of applications one is going to use on that network. Plus if it's about upgrading your setup in a pre deployed environment, things becomes even more tedious. Believe it or not, there are some CAD applications which are specific for designing structured cabling. One such software is CableProject CAD. Some key features of this application are that you can predict the actual costing of the total cable used, patch panels, etc. before the actual deployment, and you can even plan alternate cable paths to see which one suites you better. All you need to start with this application is a blueprint of the floor. You can input the blueprint in either BMP or by using any popular CAD format such as .dxf or .wmf. You can even enter it through the clipboard.

Once you are done with the blueprint of the floor, you have to enter the ports, racks and conduits location on the blueprint. You can do that by using the inbuilt component library. The component library also has predefined components from major Structured Cabling players like, RiT, Panduit, Connex, AMP, etc.

Once the details are filled in the system one can automatically generate the building plan, specifications, wiring lists, list of materials used, task list, bale list, conduit list and legends. It also lets you do real time calculation of prices of all cables and conduits. And you can even export price details into construction estimate software. You can get this software from http://www. cableproject.net/.

Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting Structured Cabling is not an easy task. We are familiar with the messy web of those patch cords and those long and never ending cablings. According to a survey, 70% of the causes for downtime are related to the faulty cable. Either the cable got disconnected; some rat chewed it up, or it got broken while some construction work was happening, and so on. The outcome is the same -DownTime! Here are some life saver technologies and tools for you to significantly reduce this downtime.

Intelligent cabling
Till the recent past, there was no specific ways to figure out a broken link on a near real-time basis. With the advent of intelligent cabling, this problem seems to be getting resolved. In an intelligent network setup, the systems can automatically find out devices connected with the physical layer and can link them with connectivity changes and also track the device locations. Essentially in an intelligent cabling setup, the specialized ports, patch panels and outlets work like sensors, which can be managed through a software over SNMP or some other similar protocol. So essentially in an intelligent cabling setup, you/ SNMP enable the physical layer devices. With intelligent cabling, a person can get a logical view of the entire network.

With intelligent cabling, documentation of the network layer also becomes automated and accurate. It also provides security as it can identify unauthorized modifications on a real time basis and can generate alerts automatically.

The Sensors
Intelligent cabling works around the specialized physical layer devices which works as sensors and are placed throughout the structured cabling. The job of the sensors is to monitor the status of all possible ports. These sensors send the information back into a centralized system in a near real time fashion. And from this centralized system some specialised applications are able to detect the errors when generated. These specialized applications are able to separate the errors and can even suggest a possible solution while alerting.

In a traditional system, if let's say a cable gets bad, the admin would have to go through a diagram of the network topology to find the incident point and then have to follow the logical path of the network to identify the problem before he can correct it. But in case of intelligent cabling, the admin is alerted with the precise location of the fault and also the system can instruct him on how to fix the problem.

The intelligent structured cabling is able to track IP-based devices such that, the network manager can access, control, and manage them from one central location. This is more critical considering today's distributed computing environments and the acute need to troubleshoot them remotely.

But the important point to understand here is that, intelligent cabling is not just a single software or hardware, but is a full fledged one which starts from a single intelligent patch panel (the lowest bit of the system) and ends to a central database which keeps track of all the feeds which are generated from such system. Some of the prominent players in intelligent cabling in India are Digi-Link (through RiT), Panduit, TyCO, etc.

PatchSee

Generally a complete intelligent cabling system could be pretty expensive. But if you are interested and would like to start with some not so expensive things then you could give PatchSee patch cords a try. These specialized patch cords are also called the intelligent patch cords which help in indentifying the other end of the cable with a very smart trick. For instance, suppose you are not getting a network link to a PC and you want to see from where that cable originates, all you have to do is to take out the cable from the PC and insert it to a light injector. This light injector injects a laser light to two plastic optic fibres which are connected at the back of the RJ45/11 connector. Now this light is sent through the POF and it reaches to the other end and gets visible, so you can easily find out that the cable with the glowing light is the other end of the cable which you are looking for. You can order for a free sample of PatchSee from http://www.patchsee-solution.com/en/patchseecom-218-53

LANSurveyor
It won't be a real help if you get an alert which says the Ethernet cable connected to machine 192.168.1.152 has gone bad. Because the biggest problem which an admin faces while trouble shooting cabling errors is to find the right cable. And if you don't have intelligent cabling deployed, it becomes very difficult to pinpoint the error. The only thing which can help is an elaborated network diagram or map. But there is a bigger challenge. Making such a elaborated map is not kids play and takes a lot of human hours, and in today's dynamic infrastructure setup, updating this map regularly for let's say 1000 node network becomes nearly impossible. Just imagine everyday all your 1000 nodes get a new IP from the DHCP and your network diagram needs updating.

To make the mapping process automated, you have this one of its kind software. It's not a cheap deal. You have to spend some 40,000 INR to get a licensed copy of this application. But once you use it you will start loving it. This is the only software in my knowledge that is available today which gives you a true map (even exportable to Visio) of your network including cable links, patch cord details connection specific ports and machines, etc.

And the beauty is that one can set alerts on not only devices such as PCs, switches, routers, etc, but also to cable connections connecting two devices. So in case of a cable failure you will get an error which will not only tell you which IP has got disconnected but will also tell you the port of the switch connection and the machines which were connected through that particular patch cable.

Fluke's EtherScope
It's a handy device to troubleshoot your network. The troubleshooter comes with a hefty price but if you have a complicated and troublesome network then this can help you to a great extent. EtherScope II from Fluke networks has a RJ45 LAN port which can support Gbps networks and a Fiber Optic 1000 Base-X port. This means both your Copper and Fiber needs can be easily managed by this device.

The interface for this device is a touch screen which is pretty tough and can withstand shocks. The device when connected to a network lets you access its interface over a Web browser. The device is lightweight with only 1.15Kg. This makes it comfortable to carry around and use anywhere on your network.

The software which powers the device is essentially a customized Linux core with some standard tools like a Web browser, a file manager, calendar, etc and not to forget the key thing -EtherScope Network Assistant application for LAN and WLAN. This is what does the magic.

This application is essentially a packet capturing, logging and reporting application which can search devices, find the amount of traffic transferred between devices and report in case of network problems. But that's not the great thing about it. There is a lot more.

One great thing which it can do is that it can tell the distance (the cable length) from these devices to the next connected node.

Which means you can just connect it to any cable whose other end is terminated to any network device and can predict where the device is kept in.This could be a great help for network admins to determine the other end of a network cable.

The other great feature of the device is its capability to trace the switch route to any machine. Let's say, you have a faulty machine on your network somewhere in the building and you want to find exactly where the machine is, this device can tell you the route through the switches (managed switches) and its ports.

For example, there are five switches between this device and the faulty machine, then it will detect all five switches and their respective port numbers from where the connection is happening. This is a great feature because one of the biggest challenges for a network admin is to figure out and pinpoint the cable faults in a huge campus with lots of cascaded switches.

Over and above, this tool also has standard cable testing features which can easily detect and tell if there is any problem with the cable and in which pair of the twisted-pairs.

This device can do lots more but that is out of the scope of this article. If you want to learn more about it then please visit http://tiny.cc/JHCxt.

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