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I'm familiar with all the standard Cisco shapes to depict various types of switches and routers. I've also come up with a pretty good shape to show encryption devices. I'm having a hard time trying to come up with something that would show a media converter (Ethernet to fiber and vice versa) on my network drawings using Visio. Do anyone know of a standard shape that's used?

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There is no true "standard" symbol/shape for a media converter, since that is generally viewed as an interface-level item. Most network diagrams tend to show entire devices instead of individual interfaces, and leave Layer 1 connections as a simple line.

If I were to come up with a symbol, I would probably avoid use of standard electronic diagram ones and instead opt for a simple labeled box or ellipse, just to avoid confusion.

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That is an interesting point of view. So you don't show physical media converters or use different types of lines to denote copper vs. fiber vs. serial cables? I find myself having to do this now that I have both fiber and copper Gigabit interfaces. I used to be able to tell just by looking at the port number where a gi was fiber and an fa was copper. I also have multiple places where a workstation is too far away from a switch (not my decision) so I have a media converter near the switch and another one near the workstation. – murisonc Jul 5 '12 at 22:36
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That's a much deeper level of detail for a network diagram than I think most places use. If I wanted to do something like that, however, I would just use different color lines for different physical media types. Orange is fiber and blue is copper, for example. A media converter could be a simple circle with orange coming in one side and blue coming out the other. Heck, make a little circle with a symbol for "SX/Cu" or "SX/T" to make it clear that it's converting from 1000BASE-SX to Copper. – Hyppy Jul 6 '12 at 14:48
I like the idea of using a symbol with SX/T. I think I'll use a box with SX on one side and T on the other. Thanks. – murisonc Jul 6 '12 at 15:36

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