[BBLISA] Rent/Borrow Fluke or similar for Cat6 horizontal testing

[Edward Ned Harvey (bblisa4)]

> From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On
> Behalf Of Jon Young
> 
> BBLisa,
> Does anyone have or know where I might be able to rent a quality fluke or
> similar cable testing to spot test some questionable Cat6 horizontal runs
> where I don't trust the wiring contractors test reports?  I'd need it for a few
> days to a week ASAP.  I've bought these before but never needed to rent
> one so I don't know the going rate for rentals or where I might be able to
> rent one locally.

I have a better idea, because I've gone through this a zillion times.  If you get a tester, you're going to see the same results the contractor saw.  But that doesn't matter, if you plug in a computer and it doesn't work, or it works suboptimally.  Test the thing you care about:

Get two laptops with GB cards, and connect them across that wire.  (Obviously you'll have to have some patch cables, and either a switch at one end, or a crossover cable, assign static IP addresses.)

Make sure they auto-negotiate 1Gbit.  Then, push several hundred megabytes across the wire in each direction.  Watch the error counter statistics on the network cards at each end.  (Easiest if you're using linux).  If you get *any* result other than auto-negotiated 1Gbit and a total of *zero* error packets, then there is a wiring fault.