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CERN Engineers Have To Identify and Disconnect 9,000 Obsolete Cables (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, has grand plans to update the world's largest particle accelerator complex in the next few years. But engineers have identified a barrier to the upgrade: there's no space for new cables in the injectors that accelerate particles before they enter the LHC. In the past, when parts of the accelerators have been upgraded or added to, engineers would often additionally replace the cables that connected them. In the process, they would leave in place the old cables that were no longer in use. Now, a heap of obsolete cables are blocking the way to install new ones needed for the accelerator’s next big upgrade. To make space, CERN engineers have set out to identify and remove the old, unused cables. All 9,000 of them.
Praise Buddha that removing abandoned cables is now a code requirement in the US. I remember an old server room where the manager wanted to raise the floor 6" so they could fit in more cables. 12" apparently wasn't enough...
Didn't the Moody Blues buy a lot of very expensive multitrack analog tape recorders from NASA to outfit a recording studio . . . which became obsolete just a few years later when digital took over?
i use patchsee cables. a bit more expensive but you'll NEVER disconnect the wrong cable again. you get a specially shaped torch which you shine at 1 end of the cable and the other end lights up. the torch has 2 modes - stable light and flashing.
there are other brands (e.g. evo6, belden) doing similar things but they tend to be overpriced and overly complicated (cable with its own buttons and batteries in jack boot).
a device that could potentially eventually produce a particle that could turn our planet into a blob of stranglets
Potentially you could stop writing catastrophic nonsense, too.
a tone generator would make the job far easier
This is the least of your concerns. If you can merely safely access both ends of the cable, that's already a big win. Remember that different cables go between different locations, and some of these locations are unsafe to access during operation, some of them are unsafe to access at any time due to presence of radioactive dust, and many teams keep different things inaccessible at various times for all sorts of reasons. You're basically assuming problems that aren't there. They have mounds of documentation detailing the routing of these cables. The cables do have identifiers, and I can state this quite categorically. This is CERN bureaucracy, they sometimes serialize their pencils for all I know.
The "have to identify" phrase is simply sensationalistic wording. They can point to each of these cables on the plans, they know what labels they have, that's not an issue. The issue is to physically get to the ends of each cable run and find them among everything else that's there, without breaking any rules and without disrupting anything where downtime can cost a thousand Euros per second.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
patchsee cables aren't transparent. they have 2 strands of optic fibre running from one end to the other. you shine into one end, light comes out of the other (no need to even disconnect the cable). the longest patchsee cables i've seen were 30 metres. i don't think they make longer ones.