Dirty Fiber Optic Connectors - Showing the Laser Pen Ninja Hack - 1117

[Music] hi and welcome to my playhouse and today i'm messing around with some fiber optic cables that um yeah i'm cleaning and then i have shown this trick before but i want to show you where well this is a very expensive micro scope that can see the end of a fiber optic cable and see if it's sturdy or not and it can check it for you and tells you if the fiber optic cable is good or if it's bad very expensive but this is a laser thinking it sends out a laser light right now i have it protected it's easier to see that this is lighting up then this well actually that's you can see that but it sends a laser light out into the fiber optic cable and it's very easy to use this and also see if the fiber is dirty or not so i want to show you that trick because it's very handy and you might not always need the expensive device to check your cables so um to the table here i have a bag of old fiber optic cables that are scored from work because we don't reuse those so let's just pick one there and you can see when they're thrown out they're not protected because it's garbage right so um we need to clean those and we need to put on some some some end caps to protect them from being dirty and i might as well go get those end caps right away because as soon as one is on a cable like that there is four connection or four end points and if um if it's left unprotected there's a very very big chance that it's gonna be dirty in a second or two so being one of those people that are very very bad at throwing stuff away i have another bag here with good stuff including in the bottom a lot of these end caps for these cables because we have been installing quite a few of these so let's just have some of those ready so first let's use the microscope this is um i have done a video on this this is a cheaper one this one only does lce well actually it does multiple cables but it doesn't do mpo cables so it has a protective thinking here and that turn it on here there it comes on and then we can pop the cable in here and we can see that yeah [Music] this is what the cable look like this is a bloody mess this one tests it so if we can press the button here it checks it and this should get a big fat fill and it does big fat fail right there so this is not good um we can just check the other connection now that we have it it's oh it's not as sturdy but it definitely doesn't look good yeah it fails too um you can actually wipe this in your in your closing we could try and rub it in my let's just let's just try and rub it in my sleeve here this is not how you do it but it could actually now that it's this dirty it could actually get more clean see more clean but it's not perfect see there is still stuff there it's not not nowhere near perfect but better definitely better but it's not a bulletproof way you could get as the smallest little hair from your sweater to block the lights and that wouldn't be great this is a nice device for exactly that let's try the laser thinking where did i put it there so laser thinking um let's just make sure was this the one we were just looking at this is not that dirty but it has some really big nasty stuff up there you can see that up the top some nasties let's check the other one same thing nasties so um i have a converter here this is for my laser thinking if you're buying a laser pin for checking fiber optic cables this is a good thing to have um i wish i had a double one but i only have a single one but i'm not even sure that a double one is but it fits on the cable and when i take the laser thing the protective cap it also fits on the laser so now i can send the laser beam out and we can see on the table that it goes through the cable we can also see where it comes out i'll turn the lights off again here can you see that that's not difficult to see and there is a magic trick this is a fiber optic cleaner and it it cleans the fiber optic cable you um we should have a look at that it looks like this they are available they cost about uh 15 maybe a little bit less but what it does is it has the smallest of the smallest little thing here there and there is a tiny little string that moves around a pin and when you clean it wipes the tip of the fiber optic cable with that little string it's it's kind of like this thing you use to clean your teeth i do believe this is even thinner and it's in a roll in here there's a tiny little window where you can see it in there so that you can see when it's empty and out of string it doesn't reuse the string it just moves it out of the way and it's some spring-loaded stuff but let's turn the lights off again this plastic thing makes so that oh the laser light makes this look party party party okay um it will fit over the lights so um we can see the light and when i clean it uh if i can hit it [Music] the light goes away did you see that the light is still there but now the end of the fiber optic cable is clean that means that the the light will just pass through it without making the tip of it red so um if i take my filthy finger here and just tap it it became a little bit more red if i do it again and again and again and again again it's blotchy red again that means that the fiber optic cable is dirty like dirty like something but if i clean it again it became less so i didn't get all of it there it's gone so now the fiber optic cable is pretty clean and for use in a data sensor this is not bad there is totally gone and we can just check with the camera it turned itself off in the meanwhile this camera costs twenty five thousand in his channels oh and of course now the laser is shining right in the laser light is shining right into the camera so it doesn't see as much well it's actually pretty dirty still yeah i feel so even though it's way cleaner than before it's um it's still too dirty for the that microscope that's not bad i think it will pass i was wrong okay this is what it can look like if you have tried to clean it with your sweater there is the tiniest of hairs just laying a cluster and you don't have to move this much although it's not actually touching the the microscope the microscope is not actually touching the fiber it's it's showing it uh from a distance but if anything touches this even a little bit of wind that thing can be right in the middle of there it's only in the middle there that there is any light all the rest of it is not carrying lights that's just to make the fiber optic cable thicker but yeah i think this is an example of a cable that is beyond repair i have the tiniest little dot up there uh not the big one up there but that one that is closer and if we check and let it scan it will find that dot and it will say that it's bad there that red dot and i tried everything and it just keeps failing so this cable is crap okay so i have a couple of cables now that has tested okay um if you do the finger test with the laser thing uh be prepared that it's really hard to clean afterwards so just so that you know that so we only do that with a cable that you don't really care about because yeah cleaning it sucks i have told the story before now that i'm cleaning these uh we had a lot of trouble at work we had multiple errors on our fiber optic network and we've been changing sfps and chaining fsp and these were dying on from one end to another end and dampening in lights and stuff and we couldn't figure it out all the cables we used were brand new and right out of the bag i don't remember no it's not this brand but it was a local distributor here in denmark and well we couldn't figure it out we didn't have anything to check the cables and at some point we got a microscope we got one of these and we checked the cables and they were dirty they were so dirty we checked 100 cables brand new right out of the bag and you would expect that a brand new cable that was clean and looked good would be clean they were not we had an um 96 failure rate when we checked with the microscope 100 cables 96 of them failed and it wasn't just one connection you know there's four connections on here so some of them had multiple dirty fiber ends but as soon as it had one dirty vibrant the cable was kind of faulty you can't be sure that it's clean right out of the back there is of course a better chance of it being clean right out of the back i have forgotten to write on this how long this is one two three four i'm putting the cables in small bags uh as i go put on the the tabs and and small bags so that they don't get dirty again bought a cable like this as soon as you take the the ends of it you have to be very careful all the time not touching it and not having it touch anything because it gets dirty so easily so as i said i fist these cables out of the trash and this is what they look like generally after not being protected and laying in a bag before you start using these you have to do something to them even just trying to clean them in the sweater or getting that 10 15 laser pin and doing that the red nose reindeer test on the fiber optic cable and it's better than nothing i don't expect anyone to go out and get a microscope like this i wouldn't even get it for myself because i am too cheap to to spend 25 000 danish crowners how much is that four thousand dollars uh on a microscope like this that is definitely too much for home use but if you're in a business environment it might not be a bad idea i'm not promoting this brand at all i'm just saying microscope is a good thing to have aware that there is different kinds of these fiber optic cables like there's patch cables there are different qualities of where did the text disappear to this is an om4 cable it's it's right there between my dirty nails and this is the second highest quality at the moment there is om5 which is the the highest quality at the moment as far as i know it's a good idea to know that that exists but if you're running one or ten gigabit well you don't have to go this high you can go with an om3 cable which is a tiny bit cheaper this might be a tiny bit more expensive and then om5 is a tiny bit more expensive again it's only really important if you want to go and transfer data at a 100 gigabits or something like that then the cable quality gets important here is another cable that keeps failing see those white dots at the bottom there they're not going away i tried a lot uh right now i've just done it in the sweater to see if they really don't want to go away so it's the rest of it is also kind of dirty but those white dots doesn't go away so this cable is junk so this is kind of tedious work and it can take multiple goes to to make sure that the cable is clean i don't use the pin uh the the cleaning pin all the time because well these are expensive i have a piece of uh tiny cloth oh some paper it's specially made paper for cleaning fiber optic cables they came with a set that i got well actually um [Applause] i have the set here i actually use my private little fiber optic kit here when i have fiber optic problems at work and it just happened to come with a cleaning cloth so i'm using that to clean the cable and just wiping it and then sometimes i have to do it multiple times for it to become clean keeping fiber optic cables clean is very difficult as soon as you take those little taps off they become dirty in no time most of the time when you get a perfectly new cable it will be spotless that's how it is with most of the new cables they are good to go when you take them out of the bag from experience we check every cable we don't actually run the test we just look at the cable on the screen and see if it's dirty but if it looks clean we don't have to run the test it takes four seconds per cable or something and when you're connecting hundreds of cables well it gets tedious waiting for that every single time and remember every cable has four ins so that does become stupid at some point where you can very quickly just put it up and see that's good and the next one see that's good and yeah i do that the laser pointer method is really good if you want to find an error on a cable which is a blotchy mess every time you have to patch up a server so if a server also a vmware server has six fiber optic connections it has two connections for a fiber channel that is network storage and then it has four connections for um for network but vmware likes different connections so so there's six fiber optic cables going out of that server up to a patch rack and then it goes over to the patch panel where we have to patch it with six cables four over to the network switches and two over to the fiber channel switches which that will also brocade the network switches are cisco and aci switches blotchy expensive not that they're giving the brocade switches away but it's all blotty expensive enough rand um i hope you got something out of this video if you are messing around with fiber optic cables what do you do to keep them clean please leave in the comments below maybe you can give me some good pointers maybe even if you have a better way of cleaning them then wait wait well you never know so uh yeah thank you very much for watching my videos do subscribe to my channel so you can see me again and have a really nice day bye bye

Channel: My PlayHouse

Views: 3,343

Keywords: Playhouse, DIY, Data Center, Home Server, Home Data Center, LC-LC, OM3, OM4, OM5, fiber cable, Laser Pen, Dirty Fiber Optic Connector, Working with Fiber Optic cable

Id: Wz--4nZGX8Q

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021