This seems like a good demarcation for the colors, but two things. Its a bit more expensive, and, it typically makes for a pretty mess. You're talking pre determined cable lengths for the most part. I tend to avoid patch cables like the plague and invest in long term deployments cut to length. Intelligently strapping in mostly permanent wiring should be worth the investment and reduce outages in the long run. The colors don't hurt. Best, Marty ----- Original Message ----- From: Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> To: Glenn Sieb <ges@wingfoot.org> Cc: nanog@nanog.org <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Mon Jun 16 22:56:45 2008 Subject: Re: Cable Colors I don't know of any hard standard in use anywhere. I've generally taken to the following: Green == low-bandwidth straigh-through Telephone, T1, Serial, etc. Purple == Roll Cables (almost always serial, sometimes telecom) (8-1 7-2 6-3 5-4 4-5 3-6 2-7 1-8) Orange(C) == EIA-568b cross-over cable (ethernet xover) Orange(F) == Multimode Fiber Yellow(F) == Singlemode Fiber White == Clear (inside VPN concentrator network) Black == Crypt (Outside VPN concentrator network) Blue == Publicly accessible networks Red == Backend (usually OOB management) networks Pink == KVM (KVM switch <-> Dongle) Occasionally I encounter needs for greater specificity, but, these usually do most of what I need. I'm sure others use entirely different choices. Owen