Anybody here know about testing ethernet?

[SubCog]

Doing some networking in my house. The house is 3 years old, and has a small number of ethernet ports wired in various rooms. They all come up to the attic, but appears that they were never connected to anything. So I've been crimping some RJ45s onto the ends in the attic, and I think I've got all but 1 working. So I'm pretty stumped by this last port, in the kitchen. So here's what I'm looking at:

Any ideas?

 

[koralis]

Possible that it was actually an old landline, not a network port? They can use the same wiring.

 

[SubCog]

Well, I got it all sorted out. Turned out to be a combination of a few issues:

1. I had mis-identified the line going to my home theater... turns out that what I thought was the home theater line was actually the kitchen line... thus I wasn't testing that one, as I thought I already had it identified.
2. The kitchen line, that I believed was the home theater line... I had that plugged into a network switch in the attic. That explains why I was getting signal coming back to the tester.
3. The (3) ethernet ports throughout the house are using inconsistent wiring standards (A & B). I had to build a crossover cable to properly check.

Anyways, I resolved the issues by unplugging everything from the network switch, building a crossover cable, and rechecking every line with both a normal AND crossover cable.

I still have a few more networking tasks to complete before I'm fully up and running. Next I intend to extend the kitchen line into the living room so I can directly connect my living room electronics to it. Then I need to rewire a couple of my ethernet ports so they're all the same... technically it shouldn't matter since any modern switch won't care. Then I need to find a better location for my router. We're currently on tmobile 5g, which isn't as bad as you'd expect... but my neighborhood is in the process of getting AT&T fiber, so I'll prolly switch to that once we get it. Lastly, I want to replace my wifi mesh with one where each satellite is connected to ethernet, so I'm not having to hop the signal across multiple mesh repeaters. Anyways, it's a work-in-progress, but it will be a major improvement over our current wifi-only setup.

 

[cbsboyer]

Yeah, I've been caught by the A/B standard thing before too. I personally prefer to always use the A wiring standard because it's compatible with an old school POTS RJ11 cable (even though I haven't had a wired landline phone in nearly a decade...but whatever), but not everyone does, hence two standards.

 

[SubCog]

Yeah, I've been caught by the A/B standard thing before too. I personally prefer to always use the A wiring standard because it's compatible with an old school POTS RJ11 cable (even though I haven't had a wired landline phone in nearly a decade...but whatever), but not everyone does, hence two standards.

So the A/B standard really doesn't matter anymore, as every modern network device will auto-detect and work with either. But it matters with my cable testing device. Honestly I prolly would have been better off testing with a laptop instead, as I wouldn't have gotten bogged down with the A/B stuff.