103Com Management Programs
page 97 for information about using the DOS Diagnostic program B57DIAG.exe to run the PHY Loopback Test.)
■Test LED: Verifies that the NIC LED is working properly.
Cable Analysis
From the Cable Analysis screen, the user can monitor conditions of an Ethernet CAT5 cable connection within a cable plant in an Ethernet network. The software detects various cable conditions such as the cable length between two given nodes, cable pair breakage, cable pair polarity, and data skew between cable pairs. Given a graphical environment, it can also display the frequency response characteristics in each cable pair. The Cable Analysis screen allows you to display the following features:
■Status
■Length
■Margin
■Frequency
NOTE: Network connection will be lost when running these tests.
■Status: This field displays the cable condition status based on the cable computation algorithms. Any detected cable breakage will be displayed by messages in this status field as well as the inability to detect cable condition message resulted from the algorithms.
NOTE: User should pay attention to the status message as other field values in the Cable Analysis screen are invalid if a cable breakage or unknown cable condition has been detected by the algorithms.
■Length: Allows you to verify cable length and determine whether your configuration has the appropriate cable (calculated by cable loss and return loss algorithms).
This utility allows you to determine whether the problem is with the NIC or in the cable plant.
Interface components of the Cable Analysis/Channel Pairs window are described below:
■Cable Length Field: Presents the estimated cable length (in meters) for each individual channel, using two different algorithms.
■Margin: Minimum distance between the measured cable pair and the maximum IEEE 802.3ab limits (in dB).
■Frequency Margin: Measures the minimum distance between the measured cable pair and the maximum IEEE 802.3ab limits (in MHz) in the frequency domain.
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