I thought all network engineers worked to this sort of standard ????
Some of us do, or did, I'm not in that line any more.
At one client, I got handed this by the sparkies (they gave the network cable to the apprentice to do, totally unsupervised, and with even less clue than he had supervision) :
And managed to unravel it all, work out which was which (badly or not marked at all), and eventually turned it into this. I normally put the panels at the top of the rack, but there were a few cables "a bit short" - while there was another that went all the way to the far end of the building and half way back ?
This was the back of the panels for the phones (in house at a previous job) - mix of proprietary digital, analogue, and ISDN-2
Now let's see the other side of those patch panels when everything is connected! The test seems to be, it's all good if you can get the door to close...
Better without doors IMO. Front of the in-house panels above - and all the cables colour coded (green for phones, blue for serial, yellow for network) and all recorded in a database. Not long after I left, someone decided that was too hard, ditched the database, and used all black patch leads (and didn't even route them neatly) !
With one client (a business centre), they had a right 'kin mess. We quoted to tidy it all up (we already did their IT), but the owner decided someone else was cheaper. To be fair, the other lot did a decent job, all nicely correct length patch cables, and all neatly cable tied together ? Yep it was nice and tidy. But I suspect that anyone with half a clue about structured cabling will be ahead of me as to the effect on being able to actually move anything ?
But yes, sometimes you can shut the doors ... almost (front side of the client job above). But all that does is keep the heat in.
f'knows what it looks like now, I'm sure they'll have had some 'kin cowboy sparkies in to add data points since I was last involved.
We removed the redundant circuits which left quite a large amount of space in trunkings
Well there's one thing clients rarely want to pay for. It's a common problem to find that ducts etc are full - but no-one has a clue what's still in use and what can be ripped out. To do it safely usually means starting at the ends (i.e. where you know cables are terminated), and cutting them back as you go.
I suppose you could apply the Nakatomi Tower technique and then sort out what's not working ?
At a previous job we had a client who was a science park. They'll have that problem soon, if they don't already. They went through a phase where the park management didn't care who ran private cables between offices using the site ducting - and kept no records.
A tenant moved in and wiring was installed by cable tying it to the trunking and empty conduits. SMFH. I wish I could find photos of the existing conduit, a work of art.
We once got a job where there was segregated trunking, conduit drops to each outlet, etc. But we were told we were explicitly not allowed to touch the trunking as they'd had BT in to install their cabling and they weren't prepared to risk any "finger pointing" in the event of problems. So we were using the drops in the walls, but cutting into the trunking to get the cables out above the ceiling and running them where we could. Clients eh !
mg_smile:
