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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."
Boy, that was quick
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
but can a linksys wireless router actually work inside of a steel cabinet?
Do you have ESP?
FINALY!!! Someone actuly relizes that guys like me who do the "grunt" work in the basement actuly know what they're doing. I've gone into COUNTLESS messy racks, rooms, and basements to fix the problems. My fav. tool is a large pair of limbing nippers. I usaly start where the wire dropps out of the celing, then just rip everything out. I HATE a mess, and 9 times out of 10 it's just easier to rebuild it than it is to patch it.
... 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).
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.
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.
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."
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
Have you ever noticed, anybody who has less wires running through their home than you is a newbie, and anyone who has more wires is a maniac?
I think balance is best; those ultra-tidy racks would also win prizes in a contest for Obsessive Compulsives. Of course, maybe they are in the avionics bay of the space shuttle and need to be zipped down... or maybe they have bad infestation of those naughty server-room elves...
Somewhere in the fricking middle is best; don't zip-tie stuff that makes re-working twice the tsak it need be. Unlss your GOAL is to make re-wroking twice the task it should be...
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
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.
Back in the day I worked in a lab where the network cabling ran through the electronics shop, and part of the network was RG-58U co-ax, which is was used heavily in those days for nuclear instruments. There was a coil of cable with a BNC straight-through hanging on the rack beside all the other spare cable. Some grad student (it might even have been me) scrounged the connector for his apparatus, not knowing that it was part of the network. It took over a day to figure out why a couple of machines were suddenly incommunicado.
On the other hand, the "neat" installation examples in the article are a little too cable-tied for my taste. The first time something goes bad or needs to be changed there's going to be a lot of cutting and re-tieing going on. A few ties as required is good. More is not better.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Ha! What a crock of shit. Cables have always and will always move frequently if for no other reason than people can not afford (or will not buy) enough switchports for every drop. We had a new building wired not too long ago. In total there were over 1500 drops in the building. We had about 450 switchports total to support 400 users. Businesses however are extremely dynamic. One day they're using a conference room for a temporary training lab and need 12 working drops (wireless is not an option). The remodel X offices per week (I think it's a requirement from their charter), requiring additional drops on different walls. They move one department from one area to another. Of course one of the departments is the dev team which has numerous drops per cube. The point is wiring closets are never, EVER stagnant. Wiring closets are more comparable to a living breathing being. Hell it can develop an attitude. Wire neatly. Punch everything down and use cross connects. Don't try to be a wiring zealot. It won't work.
One of the problems where I work, is not cables that are not properly built, but cables that degrade over time. For the first 6 months, all the cables were fine. After 6 months to a year, they started having problems. Lo and behold, the cables would just quit working. When studying for the A+ (Needed to finally get it for a job that just cared about that cert), I was surprised when I read a piece saying that if you mix the metals of the connectors (gold to nickle, I believe) they start corroding, and you start seeing problems about 6months down the road.
"Will work" isn't a binary value. Lots of things work, but also cause constant problems. A Yugo will work for transportation, excepting when it breaks down and doesn't. A 500,000 line perl script written by someone who doesn't know that there are such things as arrays or strings, who doesn't understand file locking, will work if you work enough kinks out. A radio which has a poorly designed antenna (perhaps made of nails in boards), where you can barely make out the announcer over the buzzing and hissing 'works'. But in these examples, 'work' == get job done, and usually you can do better than that. The 500,000 line perl script produces the desired output, but what if you have to make a change? No, you can't do that without repeating the entire work the kinks out process because of the numerous unaccounted for side effects. So it doesn't 'work' if you require anything above absolute basic 'get the job done' functionality (such as the ability to make changes, or to enjoy music in the case of the radio), and if you can point out anything that just requires that basic functionality I will be glad to point out where you are short sighted and stupid.