I'm in the process of replacing the jacks on our cat 5e phones lines to set up a wired network in our house. It's fairly simple, just 2 jacks in the basement and 1 upstairs. The 2 basement jacks were easy to identify, they were the last 2 on the strip, and were different cable because they were run when we finished the basement.

Does anyone know of a good way to identify which cable running into the strip in the basement belongs to the room upstairs? My only idea is to disconnect them one at a time, until I get no dial tone on a phone plugged in up there, but then I have to put them back onto the strip, which I'm not sure if it'll require a special tool or not.

http://xkcd.com/454/

You could measure the voltage on the line, then hook up a phone upstairs, take the receiver off the hook and measure the voltage again. You should see a sizable DC dip in the voltage on the line with the phone plugged into it (an old-school phone, not a new one with its own power supply).

Phone lines provide something like 50V DC, but with a high enough output impedance that you should start to see it dip when you have a phone plugged in and drawing a fair amount of current (i.e., off hook). Not sure if they are all bussed common so you'll see the dip on all the lines or not, however.

yea, they're all parallel on the base bus strip. So I guess I'll just start disconnecting them... boo

2nd blue wire I pulled was the right one! Thanks to cordless phones so I didn't have to go up and down 2 flights of stairs to check for the dial-tone. Oh, shame on me for assuming the pair of orange wires next to the correct blue ones belonged to the same cable... Not bad, I only had to put 3 wires back into the bus. All of our phones go through the same wireless base, and that still works, yay.

Wired infrastructure is all in place: Tomatofied router (thanks adam for the tweet about installing tomato at work, I read it right at my peak of frustration with openWRT), 2 5-port switches, and the old wireless router set in access point mode. Now I'm just waiting on my order of patch cables so I can hook everything up.



all these cables for $24, I LOVE PARTS EXPRESS!

They make a tone generator for such a thing. Essentially you clip on the little generator, then you take the other end up to the panel that terminates the cable and move it until you find the correct pair. I know you figured it out, but for future projects:

http://www.datacomtools.com/images3/gre ... e/701K.jpg