Join the conversation; call 1-877-763-3246, leave a comment below the video, or hit me up on Twitter (@PaulAlanClif)
On today’s Tech, No Babel: Troubleshooting Techniques: Reterminating Cables
All things being equal, cables tend to have problems before hardware. Beyond that, the ends tend to have problems before the middle of a cable. So, reterminating cables will fix problems more than almost any other solution.
[tweet “Cables tend to break before other hardware, especially their ends. Here’s what to do about that:”]
This happened to me just last Saturday. I had just done some cleaning and rearranging of my office, moving the router from the far wall from my desk to one of the sides. In doing so, the whole system initially worked, until I moved the cables to make them neater.
After checking the obvious things (everything was plugged in and I restarted the router and the cable modem), it still didn’t work. Then I asked, “What changed?” The only thing that I had done was move cables. That told me I probably had an intermittent short.
Knowing that cables tend to break at the ends and not in the middle, I decided to reterminate the cable. I cut off the end that was most likely to have moved during the move and added a new end.
After testing, I found that I’d fixed the problem. Troubleshooting doesn’t go like that very often.
For more about reterminating cables, watch the video above.
For more questions, comments, or snide remarks, comment below or contact me at: Facebook or Twitter
More video can be found on YouTube.com
Also check out my Google+ page
Transcript: Sometimes you’re going to be troubleshooting, and you know from your troubleshooting that the problem is a cable. Depending on the cable, it might be simple just to replace it, but it’s not always that case. It’s not always that way. A lot of times it’s a really long cable or it’s a cable that is going through a wall or it’s a cable that’s going through the ceiling or conduit or something where it’s just not really easy to replace it. Here is a secret that I’ve found, and I’m going to tell you a story about how this was true in my own life very recently. That is, all things being equal, if something goes wrong, it tends to be a cable; all things being equal, if something goes wrong with the cable, it tends to go wrong on either end, not in the middle. Let’s talk about that.
It’s absolutely the case that sometimes you will run into a situation where something … A critter in the wall will be chewing on one of your cables. That happens. If that’s the case, the very first thing that I would do before I would assume that is I would re-terminate the cable. Let me give you a perfect example. I’ve just done some cleaning, some reorganizing here in my office. From your perspective, if you’re watching the video, right behind your back as you’re looking at me through the lens of the camera, is where I had my internet coming in to the office. It was coming through a wall and then into my router and then out of the router, basically right next to the router.
Unfortunately that wall, not so good for the internet. I really needed it to be, again, from your perspective, on your left, my right. I had a long ethernet cable that I was able to bring out of my cable modem which came into the house through the pantry behind the wall behind you. My plan was just to run that ethernet cable into the pantry. Then, on the other end, run that into my router. Then, from the router, reorganize everything. That, apparently, seemed to work temporarily. Then it quit working. It quit working when I went from just putting the cable generally where it was going to go to its more permanent location.
What was my immediate thought? Huh. It’s probably the ethernet cable that I created, that I terminated because it’s likely that if you make it yourself, it’s maybe going to be a little bit more problematic than something made in a factory by a machine that makes 10,000 of them an hour or something. It’s likely that that was going to be the case.
Is it the case that in moving the cable around, it got a short halfway through it? Possible, but it’s also possible that my terminations where iffy at best. My next thought is, “Okay. If it’s the case that’s either the cable itself or it’s the terminations on either end, and I’ve got a little extra on either end, why don’t I pick an end? Given that I moved the one end more, let’s start with that end. Let me re-terminate it.” this almost never happens this way, but I thought, “It’s probably the cable. I’m going to re-terminate it. We’ll see if that doesn’t fix the problem.”
It turns out it was the cable. I re-terminated that one end, and it fixed the problem. As I say, almost never happens that way, but, in this situation, it did. That just made me so happy to know that, “Oh, I just made a mistake. It was a simple mistake to fix, and it took me 5 minutes.” It literally took me longer to strip the wire, having trimmed it, than to stick it into the connector and crimped it out. It was just that easy. I didn’t have to look anything up. I just snipped out the old end, cut some of the insulation, reordered the Cat-5 to the right specification because I’ve got 3 in my head; one is non-standard.
That’s always confusing, but I made sure that it was the correct specification. I stuck it in the connector, I looked at it, I pulled it back out because I noticed immediately it was wrong, I reordered them again, stuck it back in the connector, double-checked my work, and then crimped it, tried it out. It worked perfectly.
I think it’s worth mentioning that if you’ve got a long cable, if it’s a long piece of RG-6, RG-59, or Cat-5, a lot of times just re-terminating it will solve your problem. Re-terminate it in the same manner. Don’t go necessarily from a Cat-5 with RJ11 on it to a Cat-5 with a punch-down terminal because it could be, given however you’re using it, you’re not going to get the same level of reliability. If you’re using it for networking, it may or may not work. If you’re using it for, say, a balun for video transmission, it may or may not work. If it worked before and it ceased to work, check the ins first and re-terminate them.
