cross connect reliability

Thu Sep 17 23:29:01 UTC 2009

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 02:45:36PM -0700, Michael J McCafferty wrote:
> All,
> 	Today I had yet another cross-connect fail at our colo provider. From
> memory, this is the 6th cross-connect to fail while in service, in 4yrs
> and recently there was a bad SFP on their end as well. This seemes like
> a high failure rate to me. When I asked about the high failure rate,
> they said that they run a lot of cables and there is a lot of jiggling
> and wiggling... lots of chances to get bent out of whack from activity
> near my patches and cables.

I once had a circuit go down because the fiber connector wasn't crimped
on correctly, and the fiber pulled out of the connector while a tech was
working in the cable tray nearby. After we opened a ticket about the
issue, said tech "fixed" it by shoving the fiber back into the connector
by hand, and walking away. Needless to say it went down again the next
day. Names withheld to protect the guilty and keep them from raising my
prices for heckling them in public, but the moral of the story is never
underestimate the laziness or stupidity of the cable monkeys some of
these places hire and let touch your routers. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)