Killer RJ45 cable for Polycom SoundStation 2?
I was working from a conference room, and because the Wifi was dropping, I ended up unplugging a Polycom SoundStation 2 and connected the RJ45 terminated cable into my laptop. I thought that at best I would ride the VoIP network out to the internet, and at worst it would not work. To my surprise, a horrible electronics burning smell came out of my laptop NIC. (Surprisingly my laptop hasn't crashed -yet? And it even shows that I still have a NIC in device manager)
First I thought, "The cable fried my NIC!" But thinking about it some more, it doesn't fully add up. Was this just a coincidence?
- I did expect that a cable like this would be PoE (because Polycom has no AC adapter), but there is nothing wrong hooking up a non-PoE device in to a PoE cable, is there? I'm also aware that PoE comes in different voltages, but that doesn't matter either, does it?
- I have had lot of trouble with static electricity in the last couple of days. I would touch my laptop after being away from it, feel the static and laptop would crash. I could still boot it up after no problem. Maybe there was a static discharge from that cable and it pushed that component over the edge?
On the other hand the piece of evidence that makes me think it was the cable that fried my NIC is this:
- I looked up the specs for SoundStation2 and it says that it uses analog RJ11. That was very weird to see because what I plugged in is NOT RJ11 and yet it fits perfectly fine into the Polycom ( and the Polycom works) So does that mean that this was RJ45 pinned-out for analog operation + power? If that's the case I would certainly expect "bad things to happen"... but it is just a plain looking RJ45 with all 6 pins terminated. Pin out is black,brown,red,orange,yellow,green,blue,white if that gives any hints. Also, I'm somewhat familiar with these Polycom varieties, and the way this one starts up and is ready to use instantly makes me think it's a non-VoIP, analog model (VoIP models have to boot). So maybe there are analog models with this killer RJ45 cable?
The reason I'm asking, is that if there is such as thing as a NIC killer cable, it violates all the assumptions about what I thought I was likely to encounter in a non-hostile office environment. I've been plugging my stuff to hundreds of different devices in my long career of troubleshooting, but this is the first time a cable fried my NIC
What should I watch out if for if I don't want to fry my NIC again?
Solution 1:
RJ-45 is simply a shape of plug. It says nothing about what sort of signal is being carried over the cable -- I've seen it used for multi-line telephone, Ethernet, RS-232 serial, and other things.
A "Polycom SoundStation 2" appears to be a standard analog telephone system. The reason you fried your NIC is because you fed standard analog 60-volt power into an Ethernet card that wasn't expecting it.