My messy wiring cabinet!

[maniac]

Anyone have one as bad as my Cabinet D??

 

The bottom switch in the right hand cabinet was infact a 3com Superstack 12port HUB! It had escaped me before due to the mass of cabling in the way. Soon swapped it for a HP 2524 we had in the store room, much better!

 

Mike

[webman]

Are you sure you have switches in there? If you do I can't see them for the spaghetti

[mullet_man]

Ours are just as bad, we spent a whole day tidying our main cab recently. Got four more to tidy.

 

Tidy up cabs, its on our summer to do list.

[User3204]

We recently replaced some of our white/grey cables, with multicoloured jobbies.

 

Now we have "pretty" tangles instead of white ones...

 

( We now have one colour per group/VLAN ).

[maniac]

It's a bit deceiving, I have to confess the left hand cabinet is infact our telephone patching, so the left hand cabinet is top to bottom with patch panels.

 

130 extensions from the switchboard, and 20 ports through to each wiring cabinet in the school so we can put phones wherever we need them. Years of moving phone extensions has left it like this! Can't wait to sort it out sometime soon I hope, it drives me mad at the moment!

 

Mike.

[mullet_man]

We recently replaced some of our white/grey cables, with multicoloured jobbies.

 

Now we have "pretty" tangles instead of white ones...

 

( We now have one colour per group/VLAN ).

 

Yeah we did that with our main cab,

 

Red, green, blue, black, yellow and orange.

 

Different colours for different things, e.g. CCTV, Servers etc.

 

Now like you say its pretty tangles.....

[Sylv3r]

Ours are like that at the minute also - havent got the time to tidy them up these holidays but will be looking at doing it probably October half term.

[sqdge]

Our wiring was done a while ago (before my time, so I am not to blame). For some reason the cables in the boxes are all a metre long - the longest gap can't be more the 12 inches. As a result there's so much bulk that, in one case, the door doesn't close properly.

[sidewinder]

Haha I think that actually beats most of mine

 

The worst we had was a small cabinet, about the size of the one on the left in that photo, with just a switch and a few patch panels, which for some reason were connected together with 2m patch leads.

To make it worse, there is a sink below it where teachers wash their cups (NOT my decision to put a cabinet in a potentially 'wet' cupboard) so the cables were virtually dangling in the sink

[omeydog]

Our wiring was done a while ago (before my time, so I am not to blame).

 

You are to blame for not doing anything about it!!!

 

First holiday (last Easter) I was in post, I upgraded the 10Mb Hub (no I haven't left a zero off!!!) that served the main building with a 1Gb switch and fitted a second 1Gb switch to our ICT Suite. Unfortunately I could not find a source of short enough patch cables so soon got very good at putting CAT5 plugs on!

[john]

Thats one big Spaghetti mess

 

BTW I feel for you having a Siemens Phone system.

[maniac]

Siemens phone system is ok, but very awkward to change things on, silly software never works properly. (Don't think siemens have heard of a web interface) Much prefer the Nortel switchboard from my last school, that had an excellent java interface.

 

We're secretly hoping it goes wrong so we can propose a full VOIP system to replace it.

 

Mike.

[john]

I can advise coffee accident, paint accident or waste pipe in teh ceiling above leaking, all allow you to claim a new one

 

As for the interface, I abandoned a Siemens one couldnt get into it properly, so ripped it out and put in a nice BT one in the office instead.

[bishopsgarthstockton]

Last year I had to install a new switch and patch pannel in a cab that was already bursting at the seems, had to reorganize the whole cab and redo every wire. end effort... some how I managed to get it all in but i tend to avoid as all costs of opening the door... boooooiiiiiing. keep mentioning to the it coordinator and NM that we need bigger cabinets in areas of the school, but hey, apparently we are doing just fine.

[Heebeejeebee]

Last year I had to install a new switch and patch pannel in a cab that was already bursting at the seems, had to reorganize the whole cab and redo every wire. end effort...

 

I've just re-patched our entire 42U cab because it was bursting at the seams with patch panels and switches. Some of the patch panels were 16 port ones, some were 32 and others were 24. I've changed them all for 24 ports ones and swapped out our older 16 port switches with 48 port ones. I've now got loads of room in there. Yipee!!

 

Re-patching the 300 or so cables took some time I can tell you but it was worth it. I also made all of the patch leads up myself to the correct sizes and our cabinet now has a rather nice centre parting and colour coded sections (different colours for servers, uplinks, routing/internet etc).

 

Because most of the cables were installed by lazy companies there was no map of where everything went so I had to trace each and every cable to the socket in the rooms and label them (loads of walking done).

 

Only another 9 cabinets to go now. :?

 

HBJB

[maniac]

I know the feeling of badly labelled cabinets, we've had lots of different contractors in this school over the years, and they all used different numbering schemes or sometimes no numbers at all! I want to re-number the lot one day but I estimate there's well over 2000 network points in total (waaaay more than we need!) I also doubt my systems manager would let me have the time to do it as well, I think it would take a while!

 

Mike.

[webman]

I'm going to begin the arduous task of documenting our network cabinets, data ports and locations soon. Wish me luck

[mullet_man]

I'm going to begin the arduous task of documenting our network cabinets, data ports and locations soon. Wish me luck

 

I did this once, created a nice spreadsheet with different sheets for the different cabs around school, documented all port numbers, all rooms, which device was attached to the port, which user etc.

 

And then lost it :oops:

 

Always backup!!!!!!!!

[webman]

Arrghh, bit of a "D'oh!" moment :?

[Heebeejeebee]

D'oh indeed!!

 

I've made sure I saved copies of my spread sheet and printed out the relevant info for each cabinet and put a copy in each cab. I've also added which switches are in the cab, their serial numbers, mac addresses, ip addresses, stacking information and where the fibre comes and goes to.

 

Mapping the ports to the eventual socket was the hard part since they're all over the school and very few had been named and of those that were they didn't necessarily match up with the cabinet since over the years things have been added and removed etc. Also the problem of differing naming conventions arose here as well. Plus there's only one of me at the moment.

 

I did manage to pull out a few dozen redundant cables that were for rooms that have since been linked by fibre so I freed up some space that way but I did find 7 that I could not trace at all. Only one of them had active equipment on the end of it so I guess I'll have to wait for someone to scream in September that their printer/pc/wireless does not work before I can solve that one.

 

HBJB

[webman]

Hehe good way of working it out

 

Most of ours a labelled, but it's just getting it altogether in one central location. I'll be doing spreadsheets in each cab and entering it all into our IT wiki

[mullet_man]

Arrghh, bit of a "D'oh!" moment :?

 

Totally...

 

I have learned my lesson, started a new version but finding doing it a little boring having already done it once.

[BKGarry]

Glad to see no one has mentioned the thing that there are no 0.5m patch leads in the cab, that usually helps, and i tend to use those litte plastic wirey things you get when cable are packaged to group them together in groups of 4s or 8s. Makes things a hell of a lot easier,

 

Hey and atleast the cab closes we have ones here that are too challow for the switched lol

[srochford]

Unfortunately I could not find a source of short enough patch cables so soon got very good at putting CAT5 plugs on!

 

http://www.hillscomponents.com do 0.3m, 0.5m, 1m and up patch cables

 

In quantity they're less than 30p each but only about 40p for 1 offs

[omeydog]

Only another 9 cabinets to go now. :?

 

I am thankful that we only have two cabs in the whole school - plus a patchpanel for the admin system.