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Old IT guy told me to never trust a network cable, cost me 2 days of hunting a ghost problem
My coworker Dave, who's been doing this since the 90s, insisted the new Cat6 run from the switch to the conference room was fine even though I kept getting intermittent drops on the wall jack. After swapping the NIC, reinstalling drivers, and blaming the router, I finally pulled the faceplate and found the punchdown on pin 5 was barely hanging on. So was Dave right that cabling is always the first suspect, or is it just a way to scare new techs into double checking everything? Has anyone else wasted a whole afternoon on a connection they were told was good?
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hill.barbara7d ago
Oh man, I feel this one in my bones. I had a nearly identical situation years ago where a "tested good" cable in the ceiling was the culprit, and it took me forever to finally trace it back. For me, the trick that saved my sanity was buying a cheap cable tester that checks each pin individually, not just continuity. It caught a split pair and a loose connection in about thirty seconds flat, something the network switch would never tell me. Your mileage may vary, but now I always run a pin test on any cable before I blame anything else, even if someone swore it was fine. Sometimes the old guys are right, but they forget that stuff can shift and loosen over time without anyone touching it.
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