10 Gigabit Home Networking: How to Connect - RJ45 Twisted Pair vs Fiber vs Direct Attach Copper

[Music] hey i'm dave welcome to my shop today in dave's garage we're going to continue our adventures in 10 gigabit networking by answering one of the most basic fundamental questions you likely have what are the various ways you can connect two computers together at 10 gigabits i'll show you how to connect both with and without a switch and i'll show you how to do it using direct attached copper cables that's these fancy pants units right here that look like they should be really expensive but aren't that bad at all as well as with fiber optics and good old rj45 twisted pair cable in our last installment we talked about rj45 twisted pair cables and the various category levels such as cat5 6 and cat 7. it's quite possible that you've never done any networking at all outside a twisted pair ethernet cable since it debuted for ethernet way back in 1984. when i was an intern in college i spent the summer swapping out old ungerman bass ub net cards they used a weird 15 pin setup that had would look like a gameport connector on it occasionally you might find a coaxial ethernet or token ring setup but those were the last networking things that i saw that didn't use familiar old rj45 twisted pair there's a pedantic aside about shielding so that you can annoy your friends at the nerdier cocktail parties when a network cable has shielding inside the connector on the end is actually called an rj48 not an rj45 they look the same to me but i'm guessing that one supports the connection of the shielding ground similarly the old utp acronym referred to unshielded twisted pair but now some of its shielded i'm just calling a twisted pair last time around i showed you the sfp plus port which is completely different from the rj45 ports we're all used to there are four sfp plus ports on this microtic switch for example i also introduced the notion of a transceiver that allows you to plug in various cable types into the same sfp plus port including cat6a twisted pair the closest thing to a native sfp plus cable is this the passive direct attached copper cable one thing that's different about sfp plus cables relative to twisted pair is that every sfp cable is a crossover cable that means the transmitter on one end is connected to the receive pins on the other as we'll see that means we can connect one pc directly to another with no switch whatsoever that's not always possible with twisted pair because they are wired straight through receive to receive transmit to transmit it's up to the switch or by using a special crossover cable or a crossover coupler to swap the lines if you want to connect two pcs directly anyone who's old enough to remember good old serial communications will remember the notion of a null modem cable long story short with sfp you don't need a crossover or a null modem it just works either way so this is the point at which most people take you on a tour of their home network kind of expect you to reverse engineer what they did and how they got there be impressed by it and then apply it to your own situation i'm not going to do it like that we're going to start with a blank slate let's say the pcs are represented by these two network cards because they're sfp plus all we need now is a direct attached copper cable like so we simply plug one into one pc plug the other end into the other pc and instant 10 gigabit connection good to go now to release one of these sfp connections here's a little tab here and we need to pull on that helps if you push in on the cable at the same time and they slide on out easily now this is all well and good if your pcs are within the same room or somewhere you can easily run this dac cable however if you're going to run longer runs you probably want to consider fiber now to connect the fiber cable to the port you of course need the fiber optic transceiver this little giga here is for releasing and pulling out the sfp adapter but it also retains and holds in the plastic cable housing so once we insert it like this and the other side like so we can simply insert it as if it were a pre-made cable there you go your first super exotic fiber optic connection up and running well if we're powered and plugged into something now to remove these you've got to push down on the plastic tab let me do the other one i'll turn it sideways so you can see better that releases it and then just slide out the transceiver pull down the giga and yank out the transceiver and surprising fact the retention clip really is called a giga you can look that up on wikipedia impress your friends tell someone now now unlike the dac cables twisted pair is not wired with a crossover so we're going to use this little module which flips receive and transmit and that will give us the ability to connect one directly to the other without a switch so we simply insert the two transceivers plug the rj45 cables into the transceivers and then each one into the coupler and this special coupler is what contains the crossover circuit that flips the receive and transmit and there you go two pcs connected to 10 gigabits by twisted pair but this contraption with the crossover module is more complicated than it needs to be because you can buy ethernet cables that have the crossover built in this fancy yellow one is such a crossover so the simplest one yet two cards one cable and a lot less messy to remove the transceivers we first need to remove the cable and then we flip down the little retention bar we can then pull the transceiver out of the card now if these had been rj45 cards in the first place we wouldn't have needed the transceivers and it would just be the cable in that case now what if you wanted to connect three pcs you're probably thinking that's time for a switch but not necessarily with simply two cables as long as one of them is in fact a dual port card you can through software routing simply wire them like this watch me bend this cable in the wrong direction in order to show you how not to do things this is purely instructive not a mistake on my part now if your situation gets any more complicated you pretty much have to resort to using a switch so let's remove this center guy and replace him with a microtic switch now in all these direct connect scenarios we've assumed that you're getting your internet through some other means like the other original on-board single gigabit nick but if that's not the case and you want to supply it through the single 10 gigabit connection then the switch allows you to have an uplink port which you can tie back into your existing lan wan setup and this port is only a single gigabit so it doesn't matter what you plug it into it's one gig now let's assume the more realistic case where one of these pcs is further away and needs to be connected through some other means like fiber so let's get rid of the direct attached copper on this one side and we'll replace it with a fiber link now while an rj45 cable with transceiver would be limited to 30 meters and a native port would be 100 meters fiber of the om3 variety will run up to 300 meters these transceivers are actually rated for 300 meters as well so it's not purely theoretical in fact all you need to do is use a longer cable so why don't we try that we'll remove this short cable and slammed down this big spool of 75 meters now remember you can go four times this this gives you a pretty good representation of a scenario where you've got a server room with one computer connected by direct attached copper the switch and then a remote computer connected by fiber and here's the module you need to pass it through one of those little leviton wall plates and make a fiber connection in the room tidy now i'll reconnect it as of what we're going into a wall plate in a room we'll use this as the in-room cable and the long one is the in-wall cable that connects via the module it goes into the wall plate now there's a 50-50 shot that i've got this module backwards because i didn't actually look i'm a busy man and like bill o'reilly on inside edition we're doing it live there we have our little model of a server room and a remote pc connected by a fiber through a wall plate getting its internet through an rj45 connection back to the homeland and i've just complicated a little further by adding a 10 gigabit rj45 connection now some would be content some would stop there but not me especially when i'm working off camera i'm extremely bold so let's add yet another client here we'll put back in this dual nic and we'll use one of his ports to connect back to the switch as another cautionary example for your educational benefit i'm going to wire it in a way that triggers people what do you think of that does that bother you bothers me let me fix that what i find fascinating is that some percentage population will be like huh what where do you even change and others will be like oh thank goodness now that i see this it's going to make one dandy thumbnail this configuration would actually work pretty well for a small video studio where you have two editors that need 10 gig access to say a network attached storage that is also at 10 gig and because the switch is sfp we've done most everything else in sfp for economical reasons since you can find sfp plus cars used for as low as 30 dollars sometimes you could have a 10 gigabit connection for under a hundred dollars and the direct attached copper cables are of course available in longer lengths it looks like up to about 15 meters or somewhere around 50 feet can be had on amazon if you want to go longer than 30 meters with twisted pair the cable quality becomes even more important and you can no longer use simple transceivers you'll need fully native powered rj45 ports for 100 meters that means you wouldn't be able to use a little micro tick switch so you're back to a direct connection between computers and those computers would need to have rj45 lan ports now if you're anything like me you find fiber optic to be somehow fascinating even exotic you have a rough idea how it works but not the slightest clue of what you'd actually have to purchase to build a system that makes anything work well it's time to relax because like the piano teacher who stays exactly one chapter ahead of her students i've already looked it up for you rather than throwing a bunch of multi-mode and single mode fiber optic terminology at you let's look at some basics with a fiber optic cable there are two ways to send light down it you can shoot a single beam of light downright as centered as carefully as possible using a single beam of light from a laser that's single mode it goes in at a single angle there's a single beam single mode the problem is you need a laser and some careful alignment which in turn drives up cost and complexity alternatively you can just light the whole glass core up with a big old led which shines in multiple different angles and modes and pretty much goes in at every angle flash that led off and on and send your binary data that's multiple mode normally we're conditioned to think that multiple of something is better than single but when it comes to fiber optics think of it as precision and selectivity it's that single mode laser that makes the difference the cable core is also made exceptionally tiny like one-fifth of a human hair something like nine microns and the laser is very carefully aligned we're more worried about signal loss than anything else but the fewer bounces than the cable the better and if you think about it the skinnier the core the less time the light spends going back and forth and the more time it spends going that away and hence fewer bounces and less loss multimode fiber has a lot thicker core you can blast led light in one end and it comes out the other it's not well and or aligned at all but it'll carry your cheap signal for a few hundred meters that's a big difference from the single mode high precision laser stuff which can go for miles so guess which type we'll be using that's right the cheap and easy led stuff made for data centers not the fancy complicated laser stuff intended for telecom providers now i should say as an aside that better quality transceivers can actually use lasers to drive the old multi-mode but that's probably just a function of wanting the brightness and reliability as opposed to wanting the single mode direction of the light i don't know enough about the physics of optics to really get into that so i'll defer you to wikipedia for that one but just know that you can still find some laser-driven multi-mode transceivers doesn't make them single mode necessarily it's just how they're driving the light the little optical transceiver converts the electrical signals at the sfv port and sends them down the tube in the form of led pulses a sensor at the transceiver's input port receives that converts it back into electrical signal at the sfp port on the other end and you're all set the only parts you need are transceivers and the multimode fiber cable from there you can plug it into any sfp plus switch to buy cable you need to know what speed you're running which in our case is 10 gigabit that means you need cable rated for 10 gigabit and that turns out to be called om3 fiber cables are identified by color om1 which is for old and slow speeds like 100 megabit is orange in color at my old office about a mile from here i used to have the orange om1 cable that brought in 45 megabit internet for thousands of dollars every month you often saw that old orange fiber cable in the telecom closets of office buildings and so on the next step up is aqua for om3 and om4 the only catch is you want to avoid om2 which is only for shorter runs but as long as you get om3 or om4 you should be set a quick and easy mnemonic that i made up that now even i can remember is that om3 is good for 300 meters and om4 is good for 400 meters now i hate calling anything future proof but if you go with om3 or better it can actually handle 100 gigabits for up to 100 meters no promises of course but if your in-wall cable is good for 100 gigabits i'd say you're set for a little while remember that no matter what the cable type that connects them they all terminate in an sfp plus module for plugging into the switch the switch itself doesn't know or care how the bits were transported to the transceiver because all it can see is the transceiver itself it could be backed by copper it could be glass or microwave beam or carrier pigeon as long as it carries the information from one port to the other without air at the prescribed rate that's all that matters let's take a quick look at my own server closet where we can see the three connection types actively being used obviously rj45 switch to pair cables form the bulk of the wiring we'll talk in more detail about the various subtypes later but for now just know that my general color coding is that blue is regular old gigabit red carries power over ethernet the switches and access points that need it and yellow is 10 gigabit these black cables are direct attached copper cables plugged into an sfp or sfp plus port and the single aqua cable is om3 fiber optic that single fiber connection is the main connection from my unifi dream machine pro internet router to the aggregation switch it's an om3 fiber optic run with transceivers on the other end it could just as easily be a direct attached copper cable but this way my equipment is electrically isolated from the service provider whatever that's worth and it's just kind of satisfying for me to know that the main incoming internet connection is for some reason fiber because it's cool and exotic one complication is that the ports on the poe switch are only a single gigabit sfp whereas the connection at the dream machine pro is 10 gigabit sfp plus now you've heard me say plus and not plus a number of times i haven't really identified with the differences for all intents and purposes think of sfp as maxing out at one gigabit and sfp plus as 10 gigabit when i initially connected them together nothing happened to get them to negotiate a connection i had to force the sfp plus port down to single gigabit mode and then it was happy to connect to the older slower port style but auto negotiation didn't work the final point worth noting here about connection types is that the connection from the pue switch to the aggregation switch is actually made up of two connections bonded or paired together in this case there are only one gigabit sfp connections as noted but those two connections together to the router give it two gigabits when using the bonded connection we'll explore bonding two 10 gigabit cables to make a 20gb connection in a future installment we'll also take a tour of the unified dream machine pro that serves as the backbone of this entire home network thanks for joining me today as you can imagine this kind of topic is definitely what you call narrow casting it's just you me and like two other people interested in this stuff so if you know either of those two other people please text or email them a like to this episode as it's the only way a channel like this one can grow and if your thumbs up icon is still boring old gray be sure to join dave's blue crew by clicking on it to turn its shiny happy blue after each and every episode after all i'm not selling merchandise and i don't have any patreons i'm just in it for the subs and likes so don't leave me hanging i'll see you next time out here in the shop

Channel: Dave's Garage

Views: 253,701

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Id: s2UiZVBxhas

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020