Wired Connection Scenarios

CompTIA is really big on the idea of giving you questions that are scenarios.

So when you take the exam I'm going to tell you right now most of the questions
you're going to run into feel like scenarios the reality is they're not really
scenarios they're really definitional types of questions where they paint all this
extra goo around it.

They might say stuff like what ports would John have to open in order for his e-
mail to work or something like that.

And really what they're asking for is just to know what the port numbers are.

So in this particular episode I want to take a bunch of scenario terminology that

compt uses and I'm going to compress it in a real simple way to make it easy for
you when you see the scenario questions that bring these particular issues up
you'll be able to recognize them.

Cut out all the extra goo and be able to get to the answer very very quickly.

So we're talking about things like attenuation problems or bent pins basically
anything that has to do with actual wiring type problems.

So to make it easy you can break it all down into two groups.

There are the problems that are giving you slow or poor communication and there are
problems where there's just no connectivity at all.

So let's start with the slow or poor connectivity issues.

Number one is going to be attenuation attenuation simply means that over a distance
a signal will begin to degrade.

That's why we have very strict limitations on how long a cable run can be from the
switch to the individual nodes.

If you go past that you're going to have attenuation problems period.

So when this takes place you've got a serious issue that's taking place within the
people who are pulling your cable.

If you have a situation where somebody has more than 100 meters from your switch to
your node you need to get them back in and they need to fix it.

Attenuation will manifest as a slow type of problem.

Keep in mind though that this isn't a problem you create.

It's a problem you allowed poor supervision or observation of contractors who are
pulling cable not providing you with the information you need.

Shame on you for not verifying all your distances and not having to worry about
attenuation at all.

Number two is jitter any time we have information running down the cable.

Things happen where certain packets get dropped and we built it into the network
stack as we then asked for the ones that are missing.
It's no big deal if I'm trying to copy a word document from a file server onto my
system if I miss a few packets don't worry about it.

The applications will re-ask in my Word document will come in fine.

The problem we're jitter really gets to be at issue is number one.

Voice over IP.

And secondly with video streaming in these types of situations you're having a
conversation you can't go back three seconds and pull a packet up from something I
said three seconds ago without having a very strange garbled choppy conversation
messed up video with freezes in it and that type of thing.

So jitter is a problem in those scenarios.

Jitter is wildly complicated to diagnose.

The bottom line is number one you're going to have to increase your throughput
somehow find a bottleneck and do something about it.

In scenarios they're are going to be talking about some one little connection you
have that's 10 megabit when you should be having gigabit or something like that.

There's always going to be a bottleneck and it will be clearly described in the

questions and you can take care of it.

The only other thing you could really do is you have to do some type of buffering
with voice over IP most voice over IP will allow a certain amount of delay but it
ends up feeling like you're talking to somebody in Mars and it can be very very
irritating in a lot of situations the answer to jitter is live with it.

Another one that comes up for bad connections is incorrect cable type everybody
gets frustrated we're like well what type of cable should I be pulling in.

No my answer is whatever is the hottest newest cable.

As of the shooting cat 6 AA is the thing to use although Cat 7 assuming it gets
approved by the lifespan of this video then it will probably be the way to go where
we get in trouble more often than not is when we're using patch cables.

So you've got this beautiful 6 8 network pulled out through your entire office
building and all of a sudden you're short one patch cable to get that new printer
on line or something and you reach into a pile of patch cables and you grab an old
cat 5.

Now that Cat 5 he's got regular RJ 45 that will plug in your 110 it'll will plug
into your switch just fine.

And in all probability it will try very very hard to do 10 gigabit or whatever you
have to be plugged into at that moment.

But what you'll watch in and you can literally if you stand at the switch and watch
it you'll see the switch will negotiate a high speed like say 10 gigabit if you're
that fast.

And then all of a sudden you'll watch the speed light drop and go back up and drop
and go back up.
And what you're seeing is that poor piece of cat fight the patch cable choking to
death and you didn't even do anything other than accidentally grab the wrong type
of cable cable mismatches can be a real bear to diagnose.

The best way to do that is good inventory tracking what you have and using the
right cables and making sure that when you upgrade to Cat 6 they throw away all the
Cat 5 patch cables.

Not that I've ever done that but I've heard of other people.

I've done it.

OK.

Now the whole other group of connection problems are what I'm going to call no
connections.

These are the type of things that are going to keep a home from being able to talk
to somebody else.

First of all is bad ports bad ports part merely on switches are a lot less rare
than you'd think transient electrical problems even at low voltage which is what
network it is can short these guys out.

It can be very very frustrating because one of the big problems we run into is
you'll plug your computer in at your office and you'll look back and you'll have a
good link like you're like well I'm connected to the switch.

The problem is is that you're in essence giving yourself a loop back because the
switch is shorted out it's gone bad.

And if you walk over to the switch you'll see there's no link light at all.

And the right answer is try to plug it into another port.

You'll be surprised how often that simply fixes the problem.

The other thing I might warn you is that if you do have a bad port on a switch it's
a sure sign that that switch is about ready to die and it's probably time to
completely replace the entire switch because if one goes bad the other ones are not
that far behind.

The next one is transmit and receive reverse.

What we're talking about in this situation is that you're using a crossover when
you should be using a straight through or using a straight through when you should
be using a crossover or worse you've crimped yourself a new piece of cable and you
accidentally put them in backwards making yourself a crossover cable when you think
you've got a straight through.

The trick to these types of problems is just good documentation.

If I make a crossover cable it's clearly labeled as a crossover cable and I'm going
to make sure that people are aware that it's a crossover and that everybody's OK
with that straight through is don't get labeled because most cables are straight
through and we don't run into that problem.

You can also see this sometimes on certain types of switches where you'll have an
uplink port which you can turn on or turn off just by pressing a button it will be
a normal regular port or if you press it again it now turns into an uplink port and
that type of situation it's usually a matter of pressing the button switching the
transmit and receive back to normal.

And all of a sudden everything lights up again close diagnosis.

Watching your link lights are always going to be the real clue there.

Another one that happens more than I would like to admit are bent pins.

Boy I bet some pins in my day.

The whole idea of horizontal cable you know why we go through all this structured
cabling is so we don't perturb the big horizontal runs that are going from our
patch panels into our individual wall outlets.

But that doesn't mean that patch panels.

That doesn't mean that switches can't be abused a little bit and they do get abused
no matter how careful you are over time especially if you're pulling in and out a
lot those little landing ones inside the switchboard itself can be bent.

And in that case there are people who say they can bend them back.

I am a person who says I'm buying a new switch.

The bottom line though to diagnosis is try plugging into something else and see
what happens.

If you think you've got a big pin on somewhere in your horizontal run that's where
those big one hundred fifty foot or 200 foot chunks of cable that you've made
yourself plug one end into the switch plug another one into the computer and all of
a sudden Suddens work in.

You might have a bent pin problem within your horizontal cabling itself.

Last is an open or a short.

This is another situation with wiring where somebody is being careful opens and
shorts don't spontaneously happen.

They take place the moment somebody has pulled a bad cable run this in an open
somebody may have been terminated cable or they didn't you have one of the transmit
wires all the way up and you've got an open you can have a short.

I've certainly done this where you'll take pins one and two and you're in a hurry
and they get squished together and you shove them in.

And now you've got a short.

In either case you're not going have any communication whatsoever.

So to me this is again a situation where I'm diagnosing the cable itself if the
cables are bad.

I don't care whether it's an open or a short.

I don't care if it's a bent pin.

I don't care if it's a transmit receive problem.

I'm going to replace the cable.

I go through a lot of cable mainly because it's there's no pay out in trying to
document this and diagnose it down to the nth degree.

What you need to be doing is getting people up and running because that's how we
get paid.

For jitters in VoIP and video streaming, consider buffering or increasing speed

Make sure the patch cable specification is up-to-date with the network speed

If switch lights are not blinking, try different ports or check if it is an uplink
port