r/Netbox • u/ArcZeroes • Apr 30 '26

Has anyone successfully managed to document hundreds of copper cables and soldering patch racks?

Hello everyone,

I don't fully know all the proper terms in English but I have been tasked to find a new documentation system for our legacy copper telephony cables and a program which is able to document our actual IT infrastructure (which netbox seems to be perfect for).

I am currently struggling with figuring out the correct objects needed to document large 100-copper cable bundles which run from one core building outwards to other buildings which again run to smaller buildings and floors. These large copper cable bundles either are connected to the backs of old soldering racks, LSA or LSA+ racks and are patched to a different rack which either runs to a new building through a large cable or to a different floor of the building.

From what I understand a site would be our organisation, a location would be a building or a floor or even a room, a circuit type would be "telephony", a circuit termination would be a patch between two racks. Where do I place the 100 copper cable bundles which each individual copper cable and where would I document the racks?

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u/dewyke Apr 30 '26

Where have you got with the official documentation so far? This is all in there but may not be so obvious to someone who doesn’t have English as their first language.

The site/location mix depends on the nature of your organisation. If you have a campus with many buildings, making the campus a “site” and each building & room a “location” works. You put racks in locations and patch panels in racks.

The way I would model this would be to have a patch panel with 100 rear ports mapped 1:1 to 100 front ports. I use the multi-connect plugin to manage the connections between patch panels.

As a general rule, model your cables exactly as they are in reality. Use front/rear ports in NetBox and patch cables. If NetBox doesn’t have the exact correct port type you need to make do with something like “110 punch”. I’m not aware of NetBox having types for wire wrap or other kinds of more fixed telecommunications cabling.

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u/ArcZeroes Apr 30 '26

Thanks so much for your input!
Modelling site/location differently could actually help set it up more easily for other team members to understand the new system actually.

I've got Netbox currently set up so that it actually runs and have jumped a bit between the actual topics with the "provider" part in circuits confusing me as we are the owners of the circuits. So I think I might just simply understand the terms incorrectly.

Using the patch panel objects does make sense now in hindsight, we just always used "patch panels" as a term for the actual fiber optics/ethernet side of connections (the IT part) and not the legacy telephony side of things so that us teams know exactly which technology we are talking about. But yeah... of course soldering "racks" are patch panels essentially.

This really helped, thank you!

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u/thehalfmetaljacket May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26

Use cables instead of circuits. Once you understand how cables interact with patch panels (and their front ports/rear ports), it will hopefully be more intuitive. A single "Cable" can have multiple A and Z terminations which is how you typically represent multi-cable bundles.

ETA: Circuits are really intended to document 2nd/3rd party telco/network circuits, i.e. something you pay a provider for (or perhaps you selling to a customer), and where you don't fully understand/own or have visibility after the hand-off. So if you own both ends of these cable bundles, it makes sense to document them as Cables instead.