Part Number XJCS3.4rLYFGIF or XJC3.4wLYGWY?

Back to work today. Every day I have errands and phone calls to make at lunch. Today's errand was to go find a specific brand of wall plate computer connectors for the office. To make a long story short (well, at least a little shorter than it could be) the house was pre-wired for ethernet (computer), coax (cable TV), and POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). The POTS ultimately just feeds into a cable modem anyway, but as far as the rest of the house is concerned it's simple wiring (although there is wiring for four separate telephone lines on the same type of connectors used for the computer network!). Anyway....in the room we've designated as the office there were two RJ-45 (Cat-5 computer) connectors on the wall. Most of the rooms have this, but in all the others one of them is actually the POTS. In the office they are both set up and routed as computer network lines. Knowing phone lines had been run all over the house I had a hunch one was run to this room as well, and upon pulling the plate off the wall I found it. Good, at least I don't have to repatch or rewire anything. But getting the phone signal distribution working at all proved to be a challenge. I spent nearly all of Saturday or Sunday morning (I honestly don't remember which at this point) figuring all that out and rebuilding some of the cable terminations. So now there are two network lines (we'll ultimately need both of those) plus a phone feed to the office, but the wall plate only has room for two jacks. So I set out to find a four jack plate. Simple, eh?

But they don't

give you any

compatibility

data on this

or the plates.

I had already learned from the labor intensive dropping of an extra network cable into the master bedroom that there is no standardization of these parts -- each brand is different and they will not work together. So, to avoid having to rewire the two computer jacks already in the office I decided to find a plate of that brand. Well....suffice to say that in hindsight it would have been much more efficient to buy all new parts and rewire them. After an hour of navigating a confusing maze of cryptic part numbers on-line looking for compatible parts I decided to just head out and see if I could find and look at them in person. So today at lunch I ended up (after a few stops) at Kimble Electric. They are more of a contractor's electrical supply outlet located in what is basically a warehouse, and not really set up to deal with shirt and tie people like me buying a few dollars worth of plastic parts when I don't even know the correct part numbers. But they were patient and we worked through it. And to illustrate how confusing it is, I got all the way out to the car to leave before I realized they sold me the wrong stuff. I went back in and talked to the same guy and he admitted he got confused and blew it.

So, pending the actual installation of the panels and a couple of extra connectors I think the network is nearly complete. Er....at least the HARDWARE side of it is.

Whew!!! I'm tired.