John Heywood
American University School of Law
heywood@american.edu

Are you about to build a new law school? Install a new network? Or are you responsible for troubleshooting an existing network? Do RS-232 connections to printers or terminals drive you crazy? Then this presentation is for you. It is a primer on cabling for the law school networking person. We will cover the many flavors of network cabling, including Ethernet (10Base-2, 10Base-5, 10Base-T, 100Base-T, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet), FDDI, token-ring, and ATM. We will peer into the data/telecommunication closet and see what should be there and how it is installed. We will also look at the bane of all geeks--the serial connection. We will look at how the original standard, RS-232, has been changed and adapted to do all kinds of things, and discover why the serial cable for one brand of printer won't necessarily work on a different brand of printer, much less a modem. After this presentation, you should be able to understand how cabling works, what the various parts of the cable plant do, and how to approach cable plant troubleshooting.