I came into an office today and they said that the previous technician had wired the whole office but it did not work. After using a cable tester, I looked at the connectors and saw that the colors were not in any standard I've used. The current colors is on the right side. Question: I was told before that having the pairs mixed should still work as long as both ends match. They all match. How do I fix this without having to re-crimp all the end connectors?
How weird. I've never seen that arrangement before. As you said, provided that all of the pins match at both ends the cable *should* work for straight through cat5 ethernet. That fact that it doesn't work worries me as there could be another issue. If I were you I might try re-crimping one of the cables there and see if that gets things working. At least then you'll know that it's the wiring that's the issue.
I've re-crimped one of the cables and it worked flawlessly. The problem its giving me is a repeating cycle of connectivity and no connectivity. The reason why I do not want to re-crimp all the cables is because there are many of them and the rj45 headers are quite pricey here.
I suppose the problems could be due to crosstalk between the wires. Unlikely with Cat5 but possible. It's not much of a solution (and I have never tried it) but maybe try artificially lowering the network speeds to Tbase10 half duplex on the network adaptors in an effort to reduce any crosstalk that may be occurring? Aside from that and re-crimping the whole lot I don't have any other ideas I'm afraid.
OMFG I seriously made a picture EXACTLY like this, years ago. I used to host it on my website. Talk about de ja vous. Dunno what the current bit is on about tbh:- A standard network cable is made up of two of the 568B connectors shown on this picture. A standard crossover cable is made up of a 568A on one end and a 568B on the other. It sounds like your cables haven't been crimped up correctly if they are dropping out intermittently, so regardless of the cables not being standards compliant you should recrimp them. Also bear in mind that the 568B > 568B straight through cable is rated to 1gig on Cat5e. Any other variation of pin out may affect its ability to go 1gig, so that also could be why they're dropping as they keep renegotiation to 100mb. Or from 100mb to 10mb maybe. If the switch hardware is managed, check for duplex mismatch or excessive errors/collisions.
The crimping order of the cables inside CAT5 does matter - this is partly due to crosstalk and partly due to the construction of CAT5 cables which means that some cable pairs are longer than others - so just making sure that the right pairs match isn't enough. Your best solution is to get down to re-crimping all those ends. RJ45 connectors shouldn't be that expensive, especially if you buy in bulk.
