If you thought you had wire management issues in your facilities...

George Herbert george.herbert at gmail.com
Wed Jun 19 21:08:03 UTC 2013


That's nothing.

I was in a business office colo facility in San Jose in the 2001 timeframe,
that had a (as I recall) 12-rack long patch panel setup for the 2 or 3
floors they occupied.  All the phones and LANs used the same panels.

They'd used red cable for everything.  There was no - zero - cable
management.  There was a literally hand-deep (tip of my fingers to my
wrist) spaghetti mess of wire from side to side, top to bottom, across the
whole set of racks.  Going in every direction.  No cable in the entire room
had a label on either end.

The LAN switches didn't properly handle spanning tree, so if you looped it,
under the tangle of wires the whole room's switches would all start
blinking in unison, which was your sign to unplug what you just plugged in
and figure out what went wrong.

I walked in, examined the situation, went to Frys, purchased green and blue
cables (for phone and net, respectively, did my new switch, gateway, and
phone hookup, labeled both ends of all my cables, and fled.

New owners took over as we were leaving for our permanent office six months
later.  They had a crew in to rewire it.  I walked in and was pulling my
switch and gateway out, and they commented that mine were the only properly
done cables, and profusely thanked us for giving them at least a few ports
they could identify both ends of...



On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 10:04 AM, Tom Morris <blueneon at gmail.com> wrote:

> Radio Free Asia, Washington DC.
>
> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=485799631503312&set=gm.536342003094118&type=1
>
> Just remember, you're probably in better shape than them. If you look
> carefully on the right side you can see where some cables were left
> abandoned in place because they'd become unremovable from that giant set of
> dreadlocks.
>
> --
> --
> Tom Morris, KG4CYX
> Mad Scientist For Hire
> Chairman, South Florida Tropical Hamboree / Miami Hamfest
> Engineer, WRGP Radiate FM, Florida International University
> 786-228-7087
> 151.820 Megacycles
>



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com



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