ok so this is a compleatly stupid question but is there a un written rule about cat 5 cabel colours. i mean the outside insulation. the one we see not the individual cables. just that im noticing that purple is used alot for cabeling to patch panels and brake out points. but for the life of me i cant find any mention on the web all text needs typos. There there for the reader to find,to distract them from the total lack of content. google it! wasnt the answer to the question i asked so dont be dense and give me that repl

It's just an individual decision. I prefere red cable for servers that make services available thru the internet. Yellow for phone connections a.s.o. So there is no gerneral rule for it. You can use the colours as you like, but consistently.

I agree with paulsep. The color of CAT5 outer sheath are meant to provide a very clear installations by the visual separation of the different services. i_Xp/VistaUser

We're in the process of evergreening all our old switches. We've started in our data center. Part of our plan is to color code our cabling (it hadn't been). We've decided on red for crossovers, yellow for server connections, black for clients, blue for VoIP, orange for console (remote KVM), and purple for our backup network connections. As has been stated, it's a personal choice, but for us, will most definately make life a lot simpler considering the number of switches and connections in our main server room. This combined with our labelling system and documentation will speed up any troubleshooting and/or changes that we need to do. Considering we're up to 14 - 48 port patch panels on our main switch/PP racks (just added two more yesterday as we're pulling our backup network cabling right now), anything that makes my job easier is a good thing......LOL

LOL - Personally purple cables looks ugly and repulsive as you can see from this picture. Green, orange, red, white, yellow, grey, blue, and black are my preferred choices. i_Xp/VistaUser

I forgot to add that in situations where there are multitude of network cables I also label them following Curt R handy tips below to simplify identification & tracing. http://www.computing.net/networking... i_Xp/VistaUser

Well I admit, purple's not the nicest color but we're phasing grey out completely since everything was grey prior to me coming along and most of those cables have those stiff boots you can't squeeze (I hate those). The purple sort of got adopted for use as connections for our backup network since we had a roll of it sitting around....lol...and I thought there was no point in wasting it since it's good quality stranded Cat5e. Oh and speaking of cables with boots, I've found that the thicker boots can be problematic on our high density switches. You can't use two of them (one on top of the other) most of the time. The boots on the cables in your image look nice and soft as well as thin, and would fit nicely. We've been buying premades without boots since then there's no issue about them fitting and if I have to remove a cable, I just put a piece of scotch tape around the locking lever to prevent it snagging while pulling it out of the run.