I’m porting this blog over, because it was very well received over at XForgery, and because I haven’t been posting enough. So here it goes…..
Anybody that knows me at all will probably know that very recently I got a new Desktop.
Previously I only had a laptop, so I just made use of wireless internet, but now that obviously wasn’t really an option.
Luckily, my entire house is wired with ethernet cable, so I should be able to just find the ethernet port in my office, plug it in and be good to go. Check all the open walls, no ethernet jack. Hmmmm. Move everything away from the walls, including two overly full bookshelves; no ethernet jack. Damnit!
I go through the process of tracking down wires and following them through the house. Yep, there’s definitely an ethernet cable going to that room, but there’s not one to be found. Well, there is the cable/phone jack, but what are the chances…………..?
…………. Let’s just take a peek ………
Of course! There’s the damn ethernet cable, entirely unutilized and just shoved in a wall plate where it may or may not someday be found. Laziness at its finest.
Well, I guess I’m gonna just have to do this myself. I’ve done it all before, so it isn’t a big deal. But, for the rest of you that might not be the case, so I’ll walk you through the steps, just in case you’re ever in this position, or something similar.
I decided not to be lazy and hide away a cord, just because I wasn’t going to use it, so I am going to extend the wall plate to have three plugs, Cat 5E (Ethernet), Phone Jack and Coax (Cable). I’m gonna need some supplies.
“Alakazam!” *POOF!*
What you see before you is a 3 Port Wall Plate and the 3 port types that I already mentioned. As well as a general purpose wiring tool for cutting, stripping & crimping. I actually didn’t have any of that on hand at the time, but I was able to pick it all up for about $30; the tool being a majority of the cost.
First things first, lets undo everything from the original wall plate.
First up, phone jack. They make these things pretty damn easy nowadays. Basically, you just match up the wire colors, put the applicable wire into the slot and push it down using the little tool that comes along with the jack. Here’s an example of putting in one of the wires:
And here is the finished product:
After you put in all of the wires, throw the dust cap on and you’re complete. Easy as that!
The coax is almost too easy to even mention. You literally just screw it in. I know it will disappoint you, but I’m not really gonna show any pictures of that. 
On to the part that started all of this, ETHERNET! The ethernet wiring is basically a more advanced version of the phone jack wiring. Since the ethernet hadn’t been used yet, it needed to be stripped. Do that with the fancy wiring tool.
becomes:
What you see inside is 4 wires. Wait a second, nope, it’s EIGHT wires!
There are four wire pairs. Two wires of each color, one solid and one “striped”. You’ll hear the solid wires referred to by just their color, “Green”, and the striped ones referred to like this: “White/Green”.
So the 8 wires you have are:
- Green
- White/Green
- Blue
- White/Blue
- Orange
- White/Orange
- Brown
- White/Brown
and those colorings are going to be important later, on several occasions.
There’s two “standard” ways to wire a Cat 5E cable, T568A and T568B. The “B” method was used in the past in older buildings. The “A” method is the more current method that is used. I decided to use “A”, for that reason. As I said before, this is just a fancy version of the phone jack, so it’s the exact same process, just with more wires. Just follow the colors, push the wires in and you’re good to go.
After all three cables are connected, you just have to snap them into the wall plate.
Then you screw it all into the wall.
Plug in the ethernet cable, and continue the adventure.
Now that that is done, we need to test it!
There are about twenty ethernet cables going throughout my house. I know that two of them go towards my office, and one is labeled “Office” (from the last owner), so that seems like a logical option to choose, so I plug that into my router.
Hmmmm…… no connection. I take a look at the plug and realize that this end is wired to the T568B specification…….. 
Rather than tear apart the work I already did, I cut up this wire and redo it. This is just a matter of aligning the wires in the correct order…..
putting them into an RJ45 jack…..
and “crimping” the jack, using that handy dandy tool that I showed you earlier….
Done!
Hmmmm……. still no connection. I guess my “Office” wasn’t the last guys’ “Office”. Time to try the other cable. Of course, that one wasn’t capped either, so I need to do that all again……
2 minutes later……
Plug that cable into my router.
Oooooo, another pretty light lit up on my computer. That’s a good sign!
Everything works, now I just need to make the internet usable……
