Let's talk about wiring a network.
So we talked about cable distribution,
and I mentioned things like patch panels
and how you're going to connect your switches
and your routers through the patch panels,
and that's going to connect back into your offices
into that network wall jack.
In this lesson, I'm going to show you
how we wire up those devices
and give you a hands-on look at them.
Now you look at a patch panel,
there are many different kinds of them.
You'll notice that it has six different patch panel jacks,
room to write down what it's being connected to above it.
And if I flip this over to the other side,
you'll see that it has what looks like a 110 block
where you can punch down the cables
onto the back of these jacks.
And each of these, this is one, two, three, four, five
and six, that gives us the six jacks
that we see on the front.
And it even shows you a nice little diagram
of how you should be punching them down.
Now, this is a very small patch panel.
In fact, the one I'm holding my hand is only 12 big.
So it has six here.
And when I roll this all the way over,
you could see the other six.
Now, you'll also notice they have mount holes here
because this is used inside server racks.
This allows me to mount this into the server rack,
as I'll show you at the end of this video,
as it'll give you a nice clean, clear installation.
Now if you work in a small office
or a home office environment,
you may not even be using something like this,
but instead, you might be using something like this.
And so as you can see here, both the punch down
and the patch jack are both located on the front.
Now, either is going to be the exact same thing.
We have what looks like a punch down block,
again, a 110 spacing
because we're using five or above networks.
And a network jack, that's RJ45
for you to plug in a patch cable.
So what will happen is the network jack from your office
goes through the walls, comes in and gets punched down here.
Then whatever is plugged in here,
then gets patched into your switch.
And I'm going to show you all of this in my rack
in my server closet
after we're done showing you how to do this punch down.
So let's go ahead and do a punch down.
I'm going to use this smaller block
because it's a lot easier to film here,
right here in this little workspace that we're using.
So I'm just going to push this down over here
and kind of go like this so hopefully you can see it better.
And I'm going to punch down here on port number eight.
You'll see that there are the eight punch down blocks
and then the place for us to plug that jack in.
Now before I do that, I have to get some cable.
So I'm going to go to my bulk cable.
I'm going to pull off a bunch of it
and I'm going to cut it with my crimpers and gimme some cable.
And now I'm going to go in here and I'm going to strip this wire.
So I'm just going to go right around with my wire stripper,
take off that outer jacket,
and then I'm going to separate out those wires individually.
And the nice thing about doing it
on a punch down block like this,
is I can use a lot of excess wire
because my punch will remove the rest.
Now, I'm going to go through
and I'm going to straighten these out.
I'll be right back.
So I'm back here and what I've done
is I've straightened out those wires
and so they're ready to go.
I also have my punch down tool,
which is also conveniently part of my stripper.
And it's right here at the end.
You'll see this nice little sharp place.
And so what's going to end up happening is as I go here,
I'll go through and punch down my wire.
So I'm just going to come over and pull the first wire over it
and all you have to do to punch it down is simply insert it
and push down.
It's that easy. And now it's in.
And then I'll go through the next one
and I'll just continue to match up my color codes,
punching them down as I go.
Now I do have a pneumatic one as well,
which uses a little bit more pressure.
And with the pneumatic one,
it will cut off those ends for me automatically.
This one does not, so I'll have to go back
and trim these ends off afterwards.
But you get the idea here as you go through
and you punch down according to the proper color code.
And we'll just fix a second there as you go through.
And we just continue to go through
and punch them down in the appropriate colors.
So you get the idea here as we're going to move on.
So that's the way you do things with a punch down block.
Now on the other end,
you need it to be on your wall jack, right?
Well, how do you do that?
Well, you can go to the store and you can buy a wall jack.
So for instance, here is one,
it's a 110-Type Ivory Keystone wall jack, CAT 5e.
Now once you open up the package,
you're going to have three things.
One is the actual card that came with the package itself.
This tells me my wiring diagram in case you forgot it,
the T568A and the T568B.
On the other side of this, you're also going to have
how it should look when you're done.
And I'll show you this here, just like that.
And you're going to have the keystone itself,
which is where you're going to wire it in.
And it tells you A and B right here on the side
with the right color.
So if we're doing A, the first pin is going to be green/white,
two is going to be green, three is going to be orange/white,
and six is going to be orange.
If we're doing B, we're going to flop those around.
On the other side, you're going to see
that four, five, eight and seven are always going to be
the same colors, blue, blue/white, brown and brown/white.
And what we're going to do
is do the same exact punch down technique we just did.
And then we're going to cover it off with this little cap.
So if I grab that cable, and I'm going to go ahead and grab it.
And let's see, we're going to start out here
with the brown/white on seven.
So I'll grab my brown/white cable
and I'm going to bring it in here.
I'm going to take my punch down tool and I'm going to punch it.
There we go.
And then I'm going to do the same thing with brown,
and continue to do that all the way across for all of those.
Okay, so I finished wiring this one up,
and as you can see, we have the extra excess wires
hanging out on both sides and it just comes in like that.
And we would then just close this up just like that.
And we'd want to cut off all this excess wire.
The tool I'm using, this is a very inexpensive
punch down tool.
If you have a much better one,
it'll actually cut the wires as you're going.
Now, once you have this keystone,
what do you do do with it?
Well, you want it to look like a wall jack.
And so that's when we buy something like this,
which again cost me a dollar.
And so then you're going to take
the wall jack and the keystone.
And the keystone simply goes into it,
and you can see that there's this little hole here
and we just put it in place, squeeze it together.
And now you have a network wall jack for your office
that looks nice and professional.
And again, you can make sure the colors all match.
So you have ivory and ivory or white and white.
But again, this was just something
I was doing for a demonstration.
So now that I showed you the basics, let's go see
what the final product really looks like in the real world.
So I'm going to take you over into my server room
and we're going to take a look at one of our mini racks
and you'll see that we have a patch panel there,
and you'll see how everything is wired up nicely
and how we have everything cabled away.
And that's what you want your end product to look like.
You want it to be nice and open,
have all the cables out of the way,
so good airflow can happen
and you can always have everything labeled
and know where things are going.
Let's go take a look.
So here you can see a small office rack.
And again, this is a very small office rack
because we're only supporting up to 24 wall jacks.
Up here at the top, you're going to see that we have a switch
and we have a patch panel.
Now what you can see here on the left side,
is that they are rack mounted
and so they are screwed into the rack.
Up here at the top is a patch panel,
and I'm using these small six-inch cables
going from the port that is going to the jack
in this person's office or this other person's office.
We have all of these 24 ports across the top,
and then we have a 24-port switch.
And so we just have it cabled up from port one
to switch port one, switch port two to port two,
and that will go through.
Above this, you can't see it because of the cable,
but it is labeled and it says, "This is Jason's office,"
or, "This is Tamara's office,"
or whoever's computer it's going to.
Now, why would we want to use a patch panel
as opposed to plugging directly into the switch?
Now in our situation, we don't move offices very often,
and so there's really no reason.
We just did it because we like to.
In a real office though, a lot of times
people and equipment move all the time.
And if you're going to be plugging and unplugging people
to different switch ports and moving them around,
you can actually break the switch ports.
And you can't really replace
these switch ports when they break.
They're already inside this switch,
and so I'm going to have to replace this 500 or $1,000 switch
if one of these ports breaks.
This patch panel on the other hand, costs about $50.
And so if it breaks, I can simply switch out
to a new patch panel very quickly
and get the whole office back up and running.
So it's just a matter of keeping your cost down
and giving you the flexibility you need
to be able to move things around whenever you need to.
Proper wiring is always going to say you go from a switch
to a patch panel and from the back of that patch panel,
it's punched down and that goes to the back of a keystone
which becomes a wall jack,
just like I showed you inside this lesson.
I hope you've enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look
at how these patch panels and wall jacks
and cable distributions are run inside a small office
or a home office environment.
Now again, you've been introduced to both kinds
of patch panels, the front facing ones
and the little single pieces that we showed you,
as well as one of the rack-mounted patch panels
as you saw in my own network.
I hope you've enjoyed this
and I'll see you in the next lesson.