Quote:
Originally Posted by
nathanddrews 
I want to make it look nice and neat, but it's not one of my strong suits.
Unless you've really determined where everything is going to go, and how it'll be interconnected, you sort of can't avoid the inevitable mess. You can mitigate just how messy it looks, but you have to balance that against how much trouble that makes for changing things.
D-rings and other rack-oriented cable guides are nice, especially if they're large enough to allow decent movement of cables through them. Otherwise you end up with cable connectors getting broken due to being pulled through a tight bundle (or worse, breaks to other cables in there). Velcro is nice, but zip ties are usually a lot cheaper, especially when bought in bulk. A few zip ties left in large open loops can act as poor man's D-rings. Once you're more certain about the final cabling layout you can simply go back and add the proper zip ties where needed.
One bit of advice, get ready made cables in the lengths needed.
monoprice.com is a phenomenally inexpensive supplier of all sort of colors and lengths of cabling. It's far better to use the right length than to get into trying to wrap or otherwise bundle ones that are too long. Once you find the desired setup, measure the cabling and order ones to fit. That alone works wonders for cleaning up how a rack looks. Without adding the hassle of trying to un-thread the cable later only to be locked by the bulk of a bundled extra length.
And when cabling be sure to avoid turning cables too tight, blocking air flow or making it unduly difficult to service the equipment later. As in, don't pull a cable so tight as to possibly break the wires inside of it or the socket to which it's attached. Or across the only vent holes a unit has. Or laced in so tight as to make it impossible get the hardware out for service later without disrupting a ton of other wiring to other gear. Nothing worse than trying to fix one problem and end up causing others due to wiring or connector failures.
In short, I doubt you'll find any one fully authoritative resource on 'how to wire' equipment. If only because each kind of device or wire has it's own peculiarities.
