OT: Below grade fiber interconnect points

Fri Nov 15 20:58:57 UTC 2013

On 11/15/13 12:29, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Michael Sinatra" <michael at rancid.berkeley.edu>
> 
>> UC Berkeley installed 3 CEVs (Controlled Environment Vaults) below
>> ground on campus about 10-15 years ago. One of them houses one of the
>> two main fiber penetrations to campus, including DWDM gear,
>> patch-panels, border routers, even packetshapers (back when those were
>> relevant in a large EDU environment), servers, WiFi portals, etc. This
>> stuff has all been in place for at least 10 years and has worked really
>> well, modulo the caveats below. Two of the vaults have 6-7 19" telco
>> racks, and one (the one with the big fiber entrance) also has a 23"
>> rack in addition to the others.
>>
>> Caveats:
> 
> [ 17 pages of caveats elided ]

I realize I am wordy, but four bullet points (one of which involves
apparel) != "17 pages of caveats".  Nice try.  The rest of the email was
inline replies to Justin's points.

> So, the elephant in the room at this stage of the thing is this:
> 
> Why don't you just *put this stuff in a building*, and, y'know, never
> demolish it?

Have you ever been involved in University space wars?  Especially in a
new building?  The 9-layer OSI model gets pretty top-heavy when you
factor that in.  If anything, the caveats helped to keep others from
wanting to use the space.

But I will say that the general difficulty of getting equipment in and
out of the CEVs generally discouraged UCB from doing more CEVs beyond
the 3 originals.  That _one_ caveat weighed pretty heavily.

michael