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How a Wiring Rack Should Look
Julie Jacobson writes, "It's so much fun to deride some of the worst home wiring jobs in existence. But once in awhile, we should salute some of the cleanest, most perfectly labeled cabling jobs in U.S. homes. At the recent CEDIA Expo, the association for home-technology integrators handed out awards for the Best Dressed Systems, each featuring miles of cable, hundreds of connectors, tons of steel, and a clean aesthetic that could make the most finicky designer swoon. Show them to your own installer for inspiration."
Found an old picture of one of the messiest racks I have ever seen. Personally I think a messy NOC should be a punishable offense. I can't tell you how many times some stupid blip in the system is caused by a dangling wire with so much other wiring hanging on it that it gets pulled from the panel. Nothing like a 4am pager going off, coming into work and finding the root cause of the problem is the idiots that wired the rack. Kudos to those who do it right.
Funnypics
I really does make a big difference to the poor help desk guys when they gone down to a cabnet to repatch something for someone. I wish i had setups like in that link.. *very pretty*
I currently have my wiring straight up from my computer, forward enough that I have trouble putting the moniter up and down, around a tight corner by putting a hook right next to it, onto the wall above the door by a serious corner-cut, back likewise, around another corner, a more reasonable outward corner, then guided down until the coil resting on my dresser, in a loop around back to the jack, all on hooks that slip off at least twice a day.
It's better than tripping over it.
Boy, that was quick
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
http://www.talkaboutcedia.com.nyud.net:8090/articl e/10397/ and here's another mirror
but can a linksys wireless router actually work inside of a steel cabinet?
Do you have ESP?
I suspect that someone was potty trained with a cattle prod.
Huh? The best and worst links are to the same article.
Letter To Iran
... there is such a thing as carrying it too far. I'm reminded of the tale of the junior sysadmin who proudly showed the senior sysadmin the cabinet he'd just wired up. Very neat, very pretty.
...)
The senior sysadmin looked at it thoughtfully, then flipped a single switch. Every server in the cabinet went down. Yup: every server had its entire power source coming from a single rail, instead of having the two redundant inputs coming from different rails.
Where I work, every cable to every server in the machine room is labelled at both ends. The patch panels are also labelled with the address of the other end of the cable. Makes troubleshooting network problems a lot simpler (and that's important when you're talking over 200 servers on the floor
A super-neat wiring rack is great, if you don't need to get to the wires often. If you need to rearrange wiring often (for whatever reason), there is no point in making it look great (though a certain level of neatness is required for optimum efficiency).
When they wired their mainframe, they spent about $2000 for a bunch of bix panels.
When it was my turn to do the same job, I took $5.00 and went to the hardware store, I picked up a 1ft by 4fr plywood scrap and bought a box of finishing nails and brought that in the office (the canadian head-office of a fortune 500 company, btw) and started hammering away neat rows of nails to which I soldered wires from a 100 pair cable we ran between two floors.
On hearing the hammering, the boss of the other department (who happenned to pass by by chance) came to have a peek, and he sees me hammering and soldering and asks me "what are you doing???"
- I'm doing a patchboard for the serial lines.
- Why don't you use a BIX board like we did in the plant?
- Because yours cost $2000 and mine only $5.00.
He left without saying a word.
Here is a picture of a site in Dallas, TX. This picture belongs to a HUGE telecom company. A baby bell if you will. ;) How they maintain this I will never know.
http://www.waystupid.com/item-378.htm
What is more amazing is that after several attempts by staffers, the management refuses to let people clean this up. And they show this to prospective customers on a daily basis!!!
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
I don't really care how pretty the wiring job is. Typically we denote drop speed by the color of cable.. and that is about all that really matters. What should be more important is the wiring job at various points that involve a smaller 5-10 port switch for an individual office. For the love of god make sure that things are marked and neat so some one doesnt end up plugging a switch into itself on accident.. not that *i* have done such a thing and watched the entire network come to a screeching halt.
In our computer room I just provide plenty of wire management, a wide assortment of cable lengths, and a picture of the wedgie I gave the last admin who kludged something 'for testing' and left it that way for months.
Sure that wiring looks great right now. Lets give it a while when they have to start pulling new cables and lets see what happens. I'm pretty sure they are not going to cut every zip tip, pull the wire through, then redo the zip ties. The wires will be going every which way outside of the rails. Wiring hell is every data center's destiny.
Exactly. Neat-looking network and server racks are for taking photos for glossy magazine and sales brochure covers. In a *real* IT shop, like the ones I run, things can change on a daily basis... sometimes several times each workday. We keep our racks just neat enough to be serviceable and flexible for the rapid config changes and equipment installs and removals we perform very frequently.
If I were building a house, I would almost certainly do the low-voltage wiring myself. Is there any reason not to?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Having seen these pics, I think I'll go and re-do all my cabling...I feel inspired by these mush bigger, yet even neater seups.
as the coral cache is slashdotted
7 1ba7b852f4abe99/index.html
http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/5feff91deac6cee5
I'd like to be a judge on that panel. I'd love to give out awards for the best rack.
What? Wiring? What are you talking about? Oh...
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
you could do the high voltage wiring yourself too. i've done lots of stuff with digital and analog circuits, and they nearly always have to be debugged. but once you know that black is hot and white is neutral and bare copper is ground, it's very rare to wire something at 120 volts and not have it do exactly as expected. dual-switched lights are the only exception to this rule, but only in cases where you're faced with someone else's existing work.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
While viewing the article, my wife overheard me saying, "Ooh, nice rack on that one.
Warning: The intelligence of this post may be larger than it appears.
Leave some slack!
And don't wire wrap every half an inch!
Nothing worse that a bunch of Cat5 cable cut too close that you can't even change the switch out with a different model because the jacks are in different places and the cable is too short. Or the patch panel is flaky and needs to be swaped out, but there's not an inch of slack!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Someone in Congress yells "the internet is a series of tubes!" *click* the web goes dark and the perfectly wired server rack is talking to your toaster.
Oh how we hope the cranial rectal interface is disconnected before we shitcan a century of invention.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Of course, we were talking about bus lines, not network cable, just didn't know if the same rules applied.
This is the kind of 'nice rack' that Slashdot readers are interested in. _
i guess many of you do not get into the central office of the ILECs.
:P
When you walk in, you learn what cable management really means.
Ladder racks several feet off the ground with several levels.
Zip ties no where to be seen, we use wax string. You should see
some of the racks and the cabling... they used string to hold the
cables together so they look like a pack of ciggarettes.. that tight
and cool looking.
all fiber is ran in orange tubers and plastic trays just for it.
dc power has cardboard wrapped around it whenever it gets close to
metal for rub reasons.
everything is grounded, ussually twice. two power supplies.
t1s are brought to you very elegantly, as well as ds3s looking
much spiffier then those pictures. wax string holding it all down.
people do not want cut wrists when you reach for cables u know
sooo bring on the telecom racks from old timers and see some
union work in action.
/.'ed.
Oh well, I wanted to submit my network closet at work in which they converted to a toilet paper/cleaning closet. (complete with nice Cisco Catalyst 2900, and PIX Pinesol shelving units).
You want to know what I didn't see in a single one of those "neat & tidy" wiring photos? I didn't see a single service loop. Sure, anybody can wire-tie the heck out of something and make it look nice and neat on project completion day. Hell, I used to produce racks of similar tidiness when I was 19, working for a regional communications installer doing hospital and school networks. But it takes a real artisan to make something look that neat AND design it to stand up to five years of corporate changes and rearrangements. Just wait until one of your wires has to move from the top of the rack (near the entry point) to the bottom of the rack.
I think it was a previous comment that wrote: "Neat != Usable" That's so true. (Or Neat !== Usable for you PHP-tards)
"I threw up my hands in disgust and wondered if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place."
I didn't Read either of TFA, because they seem to be slashdotted at the moment.
However, after years and years of living, I can tell you that "if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well" is just not true. Sometimes doing a job "good enough" is more than enough. It might get torn down next week. If you wash the windows "OK", that is probably good enough, they'll be dirty again soon enough.
It all depends on what you are doing. Building a house? Do it well. Wiring a computer cabinet? Pfft - make it good enought for a few years. It will change. RS-232, thin-wire, thick-wire, 10BaseT, Cat 3, Cat 5, Cat 5e... Fibre... whatever.
If you can do a 90% job for half the cost you will have enough left over to do another 90% job of something twice as good 4 years from now.
Maybe. YMMV.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
That home network "can" looks almost identical to mine. Packed into the same sized unit is a cable TV splitter, a multi-tap cable TV amplifier with power brick, a power strip, a 5 port GigE switch, a Linksys cablemodem, a phone punch panel, and loose bits of cellulose insulation. The wireless router sits in another room since I actually want a usable signal (though it does require 2 drops to the room, one from the modem, and one back to the switch). There's an abundance of unused cabling for extra cable drops for CATV, ethernet and phone.
Because it's closed up in the can, I don't have to look at it. However because things are sat "just so", if I move one thing around, most of it "falls out" if I'm ever working in there. Downside is unless I sink some metal screws in there, there's little way of mounting it.
The problem w/ these built-in units is that they're designed mostly for the manufacturer's equipment (switches, etc.) which mounts in a somewhat proprietary fashion. Using comodity equipment, it doesn't look very neat unless you found a way to secure things.
Fortunately my racks at work don't look that messy - and rip-ties ARE my friend. Just too cheap to use them at home.
$ man woman *
-bash:
I honestly don't think that it was much of a problem for RS232 communication (i.e. high-voltage, relatively low frequency).
The Raven
Now, the site seems down, but being that you labelled that "One of my favorite messy racks", and it's from a site called waystupid.com, I was expecting a set of breasts with mud on them or something.
But then I remembered I wasn't on Fark.
Did anyone else read this as:
How a Winning Rack Should Look
and think that it was going to be full of posts with links to pictures of supermodels? Not that learning more abour WIRING RACKS is a bad thing, but this late at night I wouldn't mind some nice WINNING RACK photos.
Mozy, free online backup service
--
Mine's part of my security system. If the thieves stupid enough to try to take the cabling too I'll catch them for sure. It's like the old Ray Bradbury story "Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl". Even if I'm on vacation they'll still be trying to untangle the cables when I get hope. The Gordian knot has nothing on my cabling!
Yes, all the bundles of coloured wires look nice. But holy mother of home theatre, check out the links to the project pages!
Might be an ok place to watch a flick.
This is what a hardcore geek does when he sells his dotcom to Microsoft.
When I kid in the early 1980's, I always wanted something like the main Whiz Kids room with multiple tables, electronic gear and wires strung all over the place. As an adult, I prefer my room to be neater for more practical reasons like vacuuming the floor. Some of those killer dust bunnies can put up a fight.
The cabling might be incredibly neat and tidy, but when replacing one cable means cutting 50+ cable ties, isn't that going a bit overboard?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
To a limited extent, I agree.
Neatness is one thing, but those examples just look like an advertising photo for nylon wire ties. I mean, they look nice now, but what happens when you need to move one of those connections around, say from one port to another?
You'd have to cut 50 different ties, and all the wires are cut to such precise lengths, you'd probably end up having to splice some sort of nasty extender in there (adding a significant insertion loss due to the connectors or splice). It would be a total mess. Having everything wired in drum-tight may look nice, but it's a bitch later on. Something that has more "drip loops" before all the wires get bundled up into single harnesses may not look quite as polished initially, but it's far easier to work on down the road.
I've worked on audio systems like this, and it always strikes me as something that you'd do if you were a contractor working on a one-shot job, something where you want to impress the client and justify your fee, with no real thought to maintenance later.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Pretty, I suppose, but looks like an operational nightmare. Just IMAGINE having to check for a cabling problem somewhere in one of these tightly packed systems, or worse yet, reconfiguring your server setup. This is one big reason for going with a simpler physical server setup and running VMs.
I have seen the future, and it is filled with ducts.
I reckon they look better when the wires a swinging around and making sparks and all that.
...Can one create a duplicate within the same submission.
Ha Ha, impedance in a low bandwidth, 40 year old communications protocol going a few metres?
Sounds like the electrical engineering equivalent to a computer scientist berating Aunt Tillie for using a spreadsheet to calculate her finances because of "costly floating point operations".
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
... sometimes it has a tendency to get to your head. You didn't get your EE degree for hammering some nails to string RS-232C, any more than a doctor gets their degree to treat a common cold in a healthy 8-year old. In the same fashion, I didn't get my CS degree to write Swing UIs. Did our educations tangentially cover these things? Yep, they did, but they're a) not our core competencies and b) can be done by someone who is literate and capable of following a simple single sheet of instructions.
Why are our degrees important? Well, one thing they let us do is properly identify edge cases. A self taught programmer implementing a Swing UI with a sorted combobox might decide to use a bubblesort on it, which would work fine through testing right until it got to a customer who put a couple hundred items in it, when the application would just start to unexpectedly hang. The doctor hopefully catches that 1 kid out of 10,000 who doesn't actually have the cold and needs treatment within the next 48 hours to save his life. And you, as an electrical engineer, identify when impedence would be an issue.
Ah, but here's the rub: edge cases are edge cases for a reason, and purported experts who cry wolf regarding the edge cases get ignored by a public which sees solutions which work perfectly for 2.5% of the price. And, as several folks have pointed out, you're crying wolf here. The reason the solution appears to work isn't because the grandparent was ignorant of impedence, its because its just physically impossible for that to be a problem for that device.
Or, as I learned in Engineering school (in tech writing, of all places): "You're going to graduate with a degree from one of the best schools in the country, and you'll be working your first job with tech-school grads who have 15 years of experience, and in your first two weeks one of them is going to say something you learned in school is wrong. You might disagree, perhaps vehemently. But before you voice your disagreement, figure out exactly why he thinks his way will work, because odds are it will. Remember: he's worked there for 15 years and hasn't blown it yet, or he wouldn't still be there."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Here's something I've always wondered:
If you've got a super-neat bundle of UTP Ethernet cables like this, won't that increase cross-talk? Especially for long-distances?
If nothing else, this theory works great as an excuse for my messy wiring!
ebob9
This article sponsored by; ZipCo International.
Manufacturers of the worlds most reliable and most costly zip-ties!
Organize your wiring cabinet today! You can never use enough zip-ties!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Your average network TV station has wiring that puts any telecomm to shame. I've seen patchbays just in control rooms that have far more going on than anything in the photos on the CEDIA website. That stuff *has* to be organized. Just the labelling systems are amazing, let alone the craftsmanship involved in wiring them.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
... when one kept the million lines of spaghetti code INside the computer.
The problem with your idea is that it makes sense.
These guys should see what the back of my Effects rack looks like. That includes power amps, beat machines, synths, guitars, pedals, rack-mounted DSPs, and THEN you've got my computers, stereo systems, powered monitors, cameras, lights. I've got four breakers to myself in my room (thank goodness the panel's right in my closet!) Hell, I can't even take a picture of it. I couldn't get it all in four shots If I stood in the other corner of the room!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You're totally right. That's something I've learned at my new job. I was always trying to do things perfectly, and I realized that it took too long to do them as well as I wanted, and even then they wouldn't be *perfect*. I thought back to my metals class when my teacher talked about the level of accuracy which is necessary for particular jobs, and how you wouldn't build a house while measuring lengths in micrometers just as you wouldn't build an engine while measuring in inches. (I forget the name of the principle, I was in Jr. High.)
What really drove that point home was when somebody plugged an ethernet switch into itself a few weeks after I'd done a moderately good wiring job in our closet and I had to tear it all out because I couldn't even get to our management console on the switch to see which port was causing the traffic storm. (Netgear FSM750S if you want to know.) So, just as many people had pointed out, my zip-tied bundle of cables did me no good and they are now hanging off the side of the switch in a mess, no longer matched up to the numbers on the patch panel.
I guess it really does matter what kind of job you're doing... If you're not going to be changing anything, zip tying it all up might make sense. They staple AC wires inside the walls of houses, so I'm sure we can find an instance where zipping up cables would be appropriate. For me though, I'll take velcro and a slight mess.
No. A hardcore geek does it himself :-)
But seriously. That second system has got to be *loud*. Those Crown amps are meant for huge auditorium-sized PA systems.
And there's at least 7 of them in that system.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Don't know if people realised, but 120V actually is low voltage, at least according to Australian standards and the International ones they're derived from.
LV = up to 1000V AC or 1500V DC
Extra Low Voltage = up to 46.4V AC or 60V DC
Telecommunications Network Voltage can be higher than ELV but must be current-limited to minimise danger.
AS/ACIF S008 and S009 are legislated standards in Australia, regulating who can do what with cable installations.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
The racks are very pretty. Nice neat wiring...but not one service loop.
Anyone who has done av for a while can tell you that when a piece of rack mounted gear fails it is nice to be able to replace it by removing the rack screws, pulling the piece of gear out from the rack, and disconnecting the wires.
This is easy to do if the installer left a loop of wire at the back of each device, just enough to pull the gear far enough out to get to the connections.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... I feel I am the worst wiring technician on the planet. All I have to do is look at a cable to get it tangled!
I remember seeing old step by step telephone exchanges, beatifully wired,such as a 1000+ cable pairs starting at the top of a rack, in a circular bundle nearly 12" in diameter, tapering to form a perfect inverted cone down to the last pair! All held together by lacing with waxed twine! BTW reusable/releaseable zip ties are available and are great for comms cabs that need occasional wiring changes.
All the wiring is too tight, most of them I can't see any wire labels, there is no service loop on any of them, the old phone guys knew how to wire. How do they expect to service any of it? What happens when you need to change or move equipment do they rewire the whole house? Thanks for posting the story I have few guys that tend to build systems this way and it really needs to stop, now I have some pictures of what is not acceptable. It can be both clean and serviceable.
when the article is asking us to go look at some nice racks?
Mebbie they don't like messy racks, but their site is messy. It's back up now, but you'll notice that page is 800k in size. No wonder it went down. Also, for those who want to know what the first link was supposed to point to, try this http://www.cepro.com/search/keyword/Bad%20Installs .html
Funnypics
It wasn't on a rack, but I think I'm squeaking by with being on topic.
I used to gut and rewire video game cabinets and took great pride in doing so. Nary a wire would run at an angle other than zero or ninety degrees when I was done with it. Tearing out the old, crap wiring job was a lot of fun. There are a *lot* of bad wiring jobs in video game cabinets.
A friend of mine had picked up a video game cabinet at an auction once (some Tecmo game, as I recall). I was to rewire it for him. The back panel on the cabinet was held on with nails. Once I'd pried it off, I had a peek inside. Oh, my god, the horror.
The first thing I noticed was that *every* single wire in the cabinet was orange. The previous person who worked on it must have only had a big spool of orange wire, or something. Ok, fair enough, you make do with what you've got. Didn't matter anyway because I was ripping it all out. However, the other thing I noticed was that this person must have been running low on orange wire because every single wire in the cabinet ran in a straight line from connection to connection. It was like a great big orange spider web. Most of the wires were so taut you could pluck them and hear a note.
I've never seen anything worse, before or since.
In this post, let us discuss the word "Choice." It is a word that we in the FOSS community like to throw around quite a bit, especially when justifying the existance of 30 different ways to "ls" in color. So the choice I'd like to discuss is this one: What are YOU doing this winter? Getting tangled up in wiring racks? How about something a bit more fun? Taglit-birthright israel with Sachlav Educational Experience. This is a free trip to Israel, not a trick to make you buy something, or a contest you have to win. And there's no essay to write. It is a free trip to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18 to 26. If you're eligible, you could be there this winter with a group of peers, connecting with IDF soldiers your age who will join your group, hiking Masada, taking an unsinkable swim at the Dead Sea, seeing the holy sites, and a whole lot more. Bring a camera and lots of memory cards to take pictures of your new friends from the United States and Israel. This trip is an action-packed 10 days, and the entire experience is amazing and uplifting. Trips take place around late December through early January. Travel on Taglit-birthright israel. EXPERIENCE Israel FREE with Sachlav. Sure beats tripping over gobs of wiring back here at home while your friends are having the time of their life in beautiful Israel. So what's your choice?
It's A/V wiring, so I won't bitch too loudly about the zip ties. However, no IT wiring should ever use (single use) zip ties... they look like crap and are pain in the ass to remove. Besides, NEBS dictates "yak" -- waxed nylon string; if you've ever seen any, you know exactly what I'm talking about. (I love that stuff. If done Right(tm), you can retie it... a bit shorter, but still reusable. The installers used that stuff like it was air.)
(BTW, I've been yelled at for using zip ties to hang a power strip on a shelf. They didn't care about the power strip; "that nylon tie won't pass inspection.")
Check a post I made earlier in this discussion!
I'm probably the only one, for that matter, that mentioned all of my hookups and setup in this discussion!
Yes, it's offtopic. Mod if you feel the need, but seriously, so far as I can see, nobody besides myself and the parent to this post actually got it right.
And that post above, with the Dallas Texas wire-job, I'll bet you that was the SWBell Mainframe room. I've seen almost an exact replica, albeit smaller, mess in their branch offices.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I appreciate your philosophy. I looked at this (very attractive but highly impractical) rack wiring, and thought: "whoever did this is far more concerned about looks than functionality". This means, to me, that they don't use this equipment to earn money. Appearances matter, functionality is a distant second.
It's very important to put the money on the stuff that matters! Having pretty wires leading to your servers is irrelevant if your customers never see said servers. Having RELIABLE wires that can be quickly and easily replaced if they go bad is VERY important to your customers when they actually use said servers! A few velcro straps zip-tied to the frames could make this days-long wiring job happen in a few hours, while keeping it quite neat and usable.
Then you have days more time to focus on stuff that matters - like what the servers actually DO...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This might help (grabbed from article before it got slashdotted):
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
And the really scary one mentioned earlier.
Most of those look like a severe overuse of tie wraps. I can't imagine replacing broken cables that are tiered into 24562345 tie wrapped globs, especially during an outage.
Engineered environments of Alameda CA won the gold award for best dressed system. They also happen to sell premiere residential electronic systems. Their "distinguished clientele" won't pay top dollar for wiring up their estate in a way that's just "good enough." They build systems to be shown off. I'm guessing the same kinds of people who order these systems for their houses also have excessive sports cars and trophy wives. A stray ethernet cable is probably cause for a furious call to the installer.
But I totally agree with you. I do IT work at a university. Good enough will do just fine, thank you very much.
Any good engineer wouldn't leave the racks inaccessible from all angles save one to begin with. My computers face the wall, with their vents blowing towards me. Not only do I have easier access to my computer cables, (I don't need my CD-ROM unless it's for installing an OS, BTW,) but due to the airflow of my fans in my system, I get far less component failure since I do smoke around my machine, because the smoke's blown to the other side of the room, where most of the particulate matter has a chance to settle upon things other than my boards and IC pins, causing a short. (Nicotine does conduct electricity.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A rack is a relative easy thing to wire, and especially if it is a new rack that will have a dedicated wiring for the next many years.
It becomes different when you start looking at the wiring at your office or even worse, at home. At home I have the following wires running from my PC. All a different length an thickness.
1 power cable
2 VGA cables
2 sound in/out
1 TV cable in
1 TV cable out
1 network cable
3 USB cables
1 cable to the UPS
Then I have obviously several other cables to power my speakers, my Scanner/Printer, my router/modem and my UPS. Oh and the two screens that need power as well.
I have my PC under my desk and have tried as much as possible to hide the cables. Alas maging them all the smae length is not realy an optionn, exept for the network cables and perhaps the TV cable.
And then there are the offices where you are not sitting against a wall, like I do now, so you don't have the space or the place to realy hide these cables, no matter how hard you try.
Someties you see solutions for one vable, yet I have not seen a serious solution for ALL the cables going in 5 or mor drections. http://houghi.org/Fun/PC_cables.odg is an OOo Draw of my cables and I have not even put them all in.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I had the chance to have an internship in a company responsible for cabling
and automation of the first fully computerized nuclear power plant. I toured
a few different jobs, each during one week. I spent one of those weeks with a
professional cabler.
I'll tell you that those "best dressed" cabinets would get you fired real quick
in such an environment, mostly due to lack of labeling. I spent many hours
labeling what felt like a few cables. I was living close to this power plant
and it felt very good to see the high standards used during its construction.
Check out this crazy yellow one. And it's yellow! :)
From AQFL.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I suggest such entries are tested for sustainability. Identify 100 random ports that need to be repatched and see how wonderful that looks afterwards, especially if done by non-qualified staff (like you'll often find at managed offices).
:-). It is, however, much better when tidy as you don't spend ages tracing a cable.
Making it look good NEW is a matter of sorting our your patch paths (no, I don't like tie wraps as they get in the way later), making it look good forever requires IMHO dedication and a cleanup every so often (let's stay realistc
Insert
What you're after is called control panel trunking. For an example what it looks like, go to http://rswww.com/ and enter "PVC open slot trunking" in the search box (I tend to use mainly black 50x50mm). This is, incidentally, also the trick I have seen on some rack systems to keep it looking tidy. That doesn't mean it IS tidy (matter of definition), but it looks that way :-).
:-)
Cut it to size and drop on the floor behind equipment or under your desk, or screw down where required. Best use separate ones for mains power and signal cable, but I've managed with all-in-one as well (not with audio, though).
The idea is to route the cable straight in, route out at exit point and roll up the excess inside the tray. However, if you're thinking of doing that with power cable you better make very sure that you don't go near the rated capacity of the cable (sensible in any case), so a cable powering an electric heater is probably not a good candidate.
After you're done, pop on the lid and it all looks wonderfully tidy. Yet, if you want to change something, all you do is rip the lid off and change. I've once had a workroom where I'd simply run a trunk all the way round the room, just above the skirting board, and my desk has one just under the edge, plus one running down a leg. That was a real hi tech solution, it was fitted using double sided sticky tape
In an office you just use sensible colours, so I guess blue is probably not the best solution . It's basically just following some visual tricks, the eye ignores straight lines and regular patterns.
Caveat: I repeat, this makes it LOOK tidy. It can still become a complete nightmare inside, and I've found that at occasions it's simply better to rip the lot out and start again.
So there. It's not as hard as it looks - you just have to know which tools to use..
Insert
I'm sorry, but after many years working in phone company central offices, those pictures look like "Monday" to me. Maybe I'm better at my job than I thought.
i will bow to the people who done that. it's so neat it makes me cry. they have a bunch of extremely oc people doing it.
anyway, me and my friend have been trying to find a way of neatly doing wiring jobs (inside a datacenter.) however, the problem that we have is that our patching moves from time to time as well as new additions happening. the neat pictures have everything terminated which we don't have that luxury. it's really difficult to make it totally neat.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
....please show us your rack!
I'm a great admirer of the old point to point wiring, this is an example of an amp from the early 60's - http://www.valvefacts.com/index.php/Image:Leak_Ste reo20_below_image.jpg
What would be the fun in trying to locate a cable in one of those perfectly tied, will-you-marry-me-now bundles? Where is the CHALLENGE, the spirit of the techie?
I'm a comp.science person, so we don't do such mundane tasks, but for you lowly H/W freaks I suggest that cabling be done a little worse to make your miserable lives a little more interesting.
Wow, Nice, I never saw one so neat before!
What happens if I have to change 1 wire? I need to rewire the whole rack?
No wonder IT people are losing their jobs.
That many wires running together like that are bound to have a few EM fields somewhere.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
5$ for the materials, 1 hour for the work (another 30$). Net saving 1965$.
If the patch panel lasts 1 year before needing to be scrapped, the 1965$ if invested would have returned a profit of about 180$. Enough to but a new solution of the same order and still leave cash over.
Penny wise and pound foolish only apply if the penny spend didn't work.
Yes?
for a change on ./ this is actually nerd related and not another excuse to launch into a flamewar/ rant against/for Bush/Blair/Iraq/Iran/Apple/Microsoft/DRM.
echo $SIGNATURE
Perfection is boring. Even if it involves blue LEDs. (Which I see none of these winners have.)
Also, if they really were proud of their layouts, there'd be some 10 megapixel snaps that the rest of us could pore over for minute detail.
I see a lots of wiring with labels on each cable. From my personal experience this is not the correct way to go. Labels tend to get off too easy and for a very dense cabling, it is near impossibile to read or track them to the right port. For my personal needs I create a GPL project on sourceforge, "OpenCabling", www.opencabling.org, an easy and wysiwyg system to document the cabling. It needs a lot more work, but the bigger part is already done.
Leandro ;-)
PS
If a crazy technician pull off all your cables, how can you recover from this? Save your soul with OpenCabling
I have my home system set up that way. When friends with laptops come over I can enable the wireless. Otherwise it's just a bridge between the cable modem and the Linux box.
Best Slashdot Co
The discussions of maintainability reminded me of a funny story.
At the first company I started, we had an excellent ops fellow who did all our wiring. The racks were immaculate, on par with the the winners in the competition. We never found maintainability a major factor, as things were wired right, and patch panels routed things as changes dictated.
However, on one occasion, I do remember his obsessive compulsive approach annoying. We were doing some moving around, so he was coming in and out of my office every few minutes for various changes, as was I. I typically don't screw in my monitor (or other cables), because, well, I don't need to, and I often change things around. Anyhow, the work I was doing that day involved plugging the monitor into a few different units to check things out. At one point, I couldn't remove it from the PC. It had been screwed in. I undid it, and moved it to the next PC I was checking, went to the bathroom. When I came back, I couldn't remove it, it had been screwed in again. Every time my employee walked by, he was screwing the monitor cable in tight, the way it "should be." This went on for about four or five times. The fact he even spotted it was amazing, much less the inability to walk by it without "fixing" it.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Are there are HOWTOs or 'tips' sites for doing things properly? I've tried to be clean with my servers, but I'm never quite satisfied with the results of my cable management. How do you learn how do to things 'properly': trial and error, from other admins, courses/classes?
again Yes! Like others have said, if you work in an enviroment where you have to deal with machine faults etc (I'm actually a broadcaster but its increasingly server based now and the same principles apply) it makes it so much quicker and easier if the rack is wired neatly and in such a manner that you can trace cables (numbering helps too!). Unfortunatly what I've found when Broadcast and IT kit start to combine is people can't be bothered to make CAT5 cables and so the premade patch cables get used, for a temporary bodge this is fine however on permenant installations having cables the correct length and with appropriate numbering makes life so much easier!
Stef, is that you?
Forget the wires, just get the bleeding edge Linksys pre-Z 108Tbps wireless router. It's even Vista ready.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
I completely agree with this. I work for a custom integration company and many of our racks have not been touched in years. The equipment does go bad occasionally but it gets replaces with the exact same model if it can be found. There is no reason to move cable around. Yeah it is a pain to troubleshoot if you start pulling plugs, but if you know what you are looking for and the proper starting and ending points, it is not a big deal.
Now, the site seems down, but being that you labelled that "One of my favorite messy racks", and it's from a site called waystupid.com, I was hoping for a set of breasts with mud on them or something.
The racks shown in the article look nice and all, but I didn't see any labels. They get an 'F'. Its one thing not to have labels at IDFs, but not on server racks - ever. At least one of those looked like server racks.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Wrap a ziptie around each bundle of wires. Ziptie each ziptie to your hooks. Do it tight enough so that they won't fall off.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
After reading this article, I was sifting through the site and came across an article about Crestron Eletronics SIMPL language used for home automation programming. I thought cool, let me check this out. Well from Crestron's site I downloaded a pdf that was a language reference fo rtheir SIMPL language. In it I noticed that they have repackaged and use the GNU Coldfire C compiler. I thought that was cool and of course my next thought was "where's the source code" for their SIMPL language? So they have some ftp links that supposedly point to the source code, but you can't get to them because a username and password are required. My question, is Crestron Electronics violating the GPL by selling products based on this code base when the source code is not "freely" available?
I have never been able to wire anything cleanly, no matter how hard I try. It always ends up looking worse than that yellow rack.
1. You can never do an uninstall and have it look like that again.
2. You are going to have hell tracing a poorly marked cable.
3. Those cables that were bundled in giant bundle and going vertical is tied wrongly according to BICSI standards.
4. I hope they are shielded or fibre, because there is going to be a hell of a lot of crosstalk.
5. Excellent job on the wirewraps. That is what the standards were when I went to BIC for fanning out a cable. I would love to work there:)
6. What does the ladder rack, cable trough, or cable tray look like. At the racks are beautiful, what does it look like getting there?
7. That was all installed at the same time. It doesn't look like there have been any addition or subtraction of circuits in those setups. If there has been changes, damn good job.
Just so you know Im not talking out my ass...
3 years installation experience (my actuall job) + BIC certified + 3M Fibre Certifed
Stop signs are only Suggestions
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/05/bofh_2004_ episode_38/
e to the i pi equals negative one
Talented? Maybe. Genius? Not really.
-
The winner is a commercial install not a home
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/spe nce.html
The actual content of the education itself seems to be rather irrelevant, it's mainly an exercise in branding.
Deleted
Stop making your own cables for production use! Stop being part of the problem that we have to come fix! Buy factory-made and certified cables that come with a warranty. You people are keeping people like me employed because of your save a buck attitudes. Then again I suppose that's a good thing, for me.
I've traced cables that were tightly bundled. Yes, tightly bundled cables can be traced, but it is harder, and strong hands are a help.
My RS-232 work started in a facility with several Honeywell Multics main frames, a couple of IBM main frames, and a dozen or so mini's. I've paid my dues in blood--literally--from poorly clipped tie wraps. I hate--repeat HATE--tie wraps.
Then, I'd spent some time working in telephone offices. You can tell that the telephone industry has a longer history of dealing with wiring. (Shocking, isn't it.) On many occasion, I've traced their neatly dressed bundles, and I've never scraped my hands on a tie wrap; they DON'T use them. They use waxed lacing cord instead. Sadly, this is a dying craft. 1) you have to know how to tie the right kind of knots. 2) Tie wrap manufactureres have more marketing behind them.
Experience is the only way to know what kinds of cabling layouts work well. Every style has its trade offs. Sloppy inexperience always causes the most trouble.
Professional installations use bundling for a reason; its the only way to manage massive permanent installations. In smaller environments, where tools for tracing are scarce, other styles can be used. But, don't assume that you can get away with being sloppy, because it'll cost ya.
{ return clarity; }
stop repeating stories that are clearly untrue. it makes you look stupid and gullible
You are missing the point.
What is dynamic is the movement of machines, not the cabling. End of life of a machine? No problem, remove it, put back one in place, the cable will be there, because all is tidy and no bozo is messing up with them.
In a well managed data centre you don;t need to move cables all around the place. If you need to move cables that means you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out what this is so.
Maybe your racks are no longer adequate for the kind of equipment you are using now, maybe the technology is changin and you need different type of cables. Maybe you need more shelfs per cabinet. Or more.
But once you identiy your needs, you shuld be able to provide for a solution that lsts several years (3,4,5) before you need to touch those cables again.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... it is because your data centre design is not good enough.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.. to start such a discussion, just for the hell of it. Is that what you wanted? :-)
Insert
One lives giving onself half assed excuses about whay good enough is about right.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Agreed. Even a good tech will get a cable wrong sometimes and often a cable tester will show up a marginal cable as ok. I've often fixed intermittant problems by ripping out all custom cables and putting in factory premade. Extra cable can be tied nicely and put out of the way. If you honestly need a long custom cable than do it properly with wall mount jacks. This is both more reliable and easier to label.
Or at least not in my home.
Requirements change and this super anal stuff just doesn't cut it over time. I'm gonna add my 2c to support everyone who has questioned this here.
About 12 years ago when I bought my current place I had to renovate it - the core of it is about 150 years old, the rest has been added on - and decided I'd "wire" it. So when I had the floorboards up and the plaster in a couple of rooms off, I laid in the conduit and cabling for future use. With 10Base2. Which is now obsolete.
In the interim years we lived overseas and rented the house. We returned about 6 months ago and I had to set up my office, my wife's office and the bedrooms for the kids (also some digital TV runs).
I looked at what I had:- obsolete coax, inside unsuitable conduit (for UTP cables), behind 150 year old lath and plaster and under floorboards I'd spent a fortune on preserving or replacing, with an unsuitable topology (bus rather than structured).
I decided not to replaster the house (lath-and-plaster, in case you don't know, doesn't have open cavities so you can't run wire by dropping it down), rip up the floor boards or whatever. Similarly, I couldn't just put a whole lot of faceplates for power, data and TV into those walls, because I'd need a skilled plasterer to repair them. The structured wiring philosphy just wasn't going to fly.
Here's what I did:
* daisy chained CAT-5 from the internet access point to other rooms via the _outside_ of the house (it's timber). Visible and slightly messy, but see below.
* ditto the coax for the TV
* single entry point for all cable types to a single faceplate in each room that needed it
and then:
* wired up "patch panels" in each room by bolting up the requisate hubs, splitters and powerboards underneath the desks at which people work in each room. In other words, all the wiring is attached to disposable furniture rather than requiring a rebuild of the house.
I think I did a pretty neat job, but it's a little messy and ad-hoc. However, it has some advantages:
* it's fast (takes only a half hour or so to run cables round the house and secure them)
* so what if I've CAT-5 exposed to the weather? It'll last a couple of years at least, can be quickly replaced and will probably be obsolete when it it wears out anyway (cf. the 10Base2 experience which was expensive and useless)
* by screwing all the 21st century cables into 21st century furniture (IKEA in most cases) rather than semi-rebuilding my house, I preserve the houses' value (for those who've seen the 60's film "The President's Analyst", this is the antithesis of "total sound").
For me, ultra-neat wiring like this has about as much point as building a ziggurat.
http://www.neatpatch.com/ is a company that makes a product that will help make service loops easier to manage in many situations.
Yeah, because the cables in that winning system were all store bought - NOT! How hard is it to test a cable after you've terminated it to the exact length you need for the neatest, tidiest install possible? I used to do a lot of that, and I would have to re-terminate maybe one out of every fifty cables, it's not that hard.
If you want a really nice looking install, you need to terminate yourself.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Thank you. All these people with their "Oooh, look at the anal wiring job, what if you have to fix or move something?" were really starting to piss me off. Lazy and uninformed, what a winning combo. Goobers can't even tell the front of a rack from the back, and have no idea of the right way to wire either. They're the ones who's wiring ends up looking like a plate of spaghetti in a few years.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Either:
- This is a telco dungeon in a facility the size of the Pentagon, or a big city CO.
- It's all one 10,000-meter patch cable and a really bad job of slack management.
Geez, it probably takes less than an hour to trace out a connection, and you probably only yank out 2 or 3 subscribers in the process. Imagine if it was punched down.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Finally someone who gets it. An equipment rack is not a work of art, and more cableties/velcro/string are NOT automatically better on the plug side of the rack. Hey, go hogwild with your cableties on the punchdown side, guys. But some of us have actual WORK to do on the plug side!
On the plug side:
Use the right cable length; use vertical and horizontal rackmount wiremanagers. Tywrap is a timewaster. Bundles should be neat but a little loose. Strip out unused cables right away.
Living an over-all successful and satisfying life sometimes doesn't leave time to nit-pick over some of the details.
No half-assed excuse here - simply stating the obvious; There isn't enought time to do EVERYTHING, so you need to prioritize.
How does that old saying go? When on their death bed and asked if they had any regrets; No one ever says "I wished I had done a neater job in that wiring closet."
For truly permanent installs, like wiring from the comms room to offices, then skilled (and tested) field terminations are pretty much the only option. There is way too much slack if you factory terminate end-user wiring.
For data centers, all the really good installs I have seen use factory-made trunks going to patch panels interconnected with factory-made patches. This gives you MUCH more flexibility than point-to-point cabling, and makes box installs go much faster when you can just break out a crate of more-or-less appropriate-length patch cables.
Ideal in my mind for a data center: Server -> factory patch of a good length (use several different sizes and select whichever is appropriate) -> mini patch-panel -> factory trunk -> central patch panel -> factory patch -> whatever... (usually your switch). This involves more cables than a field-terminated point-to-point setup, but it makes changes SO much easier.
I can say that for fiber, you should only use field-terminated cables if absolutely necessary. It is simply too easy to screw up optic fiber terminations. 90% of the cabling issues I deal with in my line of business (enterprise storage support) are because of poor field-terminated 50u (or *shudder* 62.5u) cabling.
SirWired
Damn my lack of mod points.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
I think the problem stems from the fact that modern networking needs a single run of cable for each port. This is in stark contrast to electrical and telephone wiring, where many plugs and jacks can be daisy-chained. For home electrical and telephone wiring, "good enough" is neat and easy.
We really need a home networking standard that doesn't require 30 runs of ethernet to each room. What average homeowner needs such a network? In the home of the future, we might see one or two computers* in each room, plus a few data-enabled devices.
* The computer would also be used as a phone, television, and stereo.
No, I will not work for your startup
You haven't been to digg. People reply all the time with "THIS ARTICLE IS BETTER:" and then give a link to the one in the submission.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
if you ever heard of one wilshire... http://photos.mednor.net/Laura_and_Andy/Geek/one_w ilshrie/
its still a total mess.
Network engineers and wiremen are two very seperate types of people, please don't confuse the two, I am actually neither (Broadcast Engineer) but work with wiremen on a regular basis on installs. This has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with reliability which we have to have as downtime on television chanels rungs into thousands every minute. If you had done your research you would know that wiremen are expensive to say the least but do the job properly. I would quite agree that 99.9% of the IT industry can't make patch cables, my industry is converging with yours but please do not confuse the two professions and their abilities on this front. Equally what you term as the solution persons in my profession would term the problem, unnumbered and overlength cables cost more time when fault finding kit.