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Ever find yourself needing to know whether an ethernet port will light up without actually hooking it up to a switch? Have a hard time remembering which port on a switch a jack is plugged in to? Fortunately it’s pretty easy to make your own ethernet loopback cable.

To start you’ll need a couple of tools: a wire cutter and a wire stripper. Of course you’ll also need an cat5 cable you don’t mind cutting up. And you’ll need a little electrical tape to clean it up.

Steps:

1. Cut about 12″ off of the end of the cable
2. Strip off about 2″ of the outer insulation
3. You should see 8 wires paired up (Orange, White-Orange, Green, White-Green, Blue, White-Blue, Brown, and White-Brown). Un-twist each pair.
4. Strip about an inch off of the White-Orange, White-Green, Orange, and Green.
5. Wrap the exposed wires together matching White-Orange to White-Green and Orange to Green.
6. Cover the exposed wire with electrical tape.
7. You can ignore the other 4 wires
8. Plug the cable in to either a network card or a switch. If it was done correctly the link light should come on.
9. Wrap the end of the cable with tape to neaten it up a little.
10. A repeat since you’ve still got the other end of the cable

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Tags: cable, cat5, diy, ethernet, hacks, network

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 6:11 am and is filed under Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.