I’m working out of the space today waiting on ZoomTown to show up (projected between 10 and 2). I looked at the network that has been setup. We spent $300 on networking and as far as I can tell we don’t have one usable jack? We invested a lot of money into having a network infrastructure and it appears that this project has died? We really need volunteers to come and fix up the network.
It looks like the cables are labeled with a sharpie. I believe what we need is punch downs. We also need cables run to the offices. Vendy was the project manager for this task and I know he had vacation recently. This is just a reminder email to Vendy and anybody else who wants to volunteer managing this project to completion.
Other projects that have funding but haven’t completed (or started) … Shelving
I’m willing to assist. I haven’t run cable in many years, but I’ll pickup a punchdown tool and help out. Do we know where everything is being run? Any diagrams?
Perhaps we should bring this up at tonight’s meeting and get some implementation scheduled?
as last i heard we were waiting to dress the cables that have been run before we punch them down. they need to be secured/anchored somewhere before being punched down to the jacks and blocks or something like that. personally, i would rather have a working network than a pretty one, but i may be in the minority.
that said, i have fairly complete set of network and cable test tools and i am down for cabling pretty much any nite this week. all i really need is a little guidance, since i am not very experienced with cabling.
I can try to be the space for a few hours to provide training/guidance to others that may wish to finish this project. I do not have sufficient time available to complete the project myself. Let’s decide on a date and time (or a couple dates/times) that I should be at the space and we can get this thing wrapped up.
First off, let me apologize for letting this sit longer than it should have. I let this project slide down my list of priorities due to not having an upstream connection to feed it with, and never picked it back up due to personal issues.
I am in agreement with the rest of you - at this point functonal > pretty. The work that needs to be done is a) punch down the rack and get the switches powered on and configured. b) Punch down and surface mount the jacks on the corner pillar on the work bench. c) Punch down and surface mount the jacks along the Internet Bar and the outside wall by the microwave. The Internet Bar jacks would ideally be mounted evenly along where I marked X’s with a sharpie, and the wires pulled through holes drilled in the back of that shelf.
I was hoping to set up a date either this weekend or an evening later this week to get all the work done, but at this point if someone else wants to pick up the ball and run with it that’s fine with me. I have to work some extra hours this week to make up for missing Monday and some catch-up from last week, so I’m not sure if I’ll be at the space for the meeting this evening.
Would it be OK if people just did a little at a time? Do we have the needed supplies at the space? If so we can just post info on how you want it done and just let people run with it. Could be a good learning experience
We just got internet around 12:30 today. And technically a phone line although I didn’t plug a phone in yet.
If somebody who knows the proper way to do punch downs etc can make it to the meeting tonight then maybe they can do a 15 minute tutorial so ppl can help build out the space?
are the blocks we want to use in the cabinet already? if not, perhaps we should mount them tonite.
also, have we selected/tested the switches we want to use? if not perhaps we could at least label them so they can be tested and mounted so they can be configged by the apropriate agent.
also we will need a ton of short patch cables made so we can light up the jacks once the switches are in and up. if we have the ends available, i can show anyone who doesn’t know how to make them. that’s the one thing i actually do know how to cable
oh, i forgot, aren’t there any unmanaged switches and a wireless AP that we could use as a stopgap so we can get at least a few jacks active until the “real” switches are ready for primetime?
i think a working, albeit flat network will serve 90% of our needs quickly (surfing the web) for about 10% of the effort that the finished network will require.
Yeah, this partially came up because I wanted to print some of the Think Python book from my laptop, however I have no parallel port on my laptop, so then I thought, “Hey, I can just print over the network… FUUUUUUUUUUUU”
It was one problem to another, the DD-WRT router we were using as a bridge is out on the bar, and we have wires running out there, into the office, but hell if I know which wires go where from out there to in the building, the next problem is we have a random cat5 cable plugging into the printer and disappearing into the ceiling and I have no idea where it goes. I brought in a spare router from home last night that I am planning on just plugging into the printer, then into my laptop, and just printing that way, it just was aggravating that we have all this networking equipment, and this wire run, and I still need to cook up my own solution to print anything.
All of the equipment we need is already at the space. The wire from the printer was pulled separate from the rest - a toner may be needed to figure that out. (Which reminds me, I still have Karl’s toner… I’ll try to get to tonight’s meeting if only to get it back to him). The wires to/from the router were rerouted - you may be able to match numbers on either end, otherwise, the toner will need to be brought out.
I can bring in a Netgear wireless router I don’t have immediate use for to provide wireless if needed - there are several 8 port unmanaged switches lying around too IIRC, the old blue boxy type. It also shouldn’t be too hard for someone with basic IOS knowledge to flatten the config of one or both of the rackmounted switches that are already racked up for the time being.
Sorry, I forgot that I have other plans for tonight. I will not be able to make it to the meeting. I can come in tomorrow late morning or evening to do some quick training if that would be helpful.
