The Recabling = Completed!

Following on from my last post, we have completed the recabling of our upstairs comms room. We had 4 days to complete the work, and managed to complete it after around 55 hours working around the clock – well ahead of schedule!

We still have a few little things to troubleshoot – namely some patch panel that got damaged and need to be re-terminated on new panels – awaiting for our cabling contractor to get back to us on that, and I’m heading back in tomorrow to sort out some printers that are on the wrong VLAN etc…

Other than that, it all went very well, all the hours of planing ensured we had minimal issues.

We had a web cam running capturing a picture every 10 seconds, here’s the time-lapse video;

Recabling Project

Before I even started at my current job, I had heard rumours of the “upstairs comms room”.

Imagine, if you will, 8 – 10 years of poor cable management, poor cabinet layout, and cables 10x too long for the job at hand. Whatever you now have in your head, double it, and you might be getting close to our upstairs comms room.

This mass of cables to the right is comprised of around 2000 floor ports and 19 1u 18 port switches, and a whole heap of cable! I would say at least 50% of the cable is not actually in use, but has become so tangled and matted, it’s easier for the guys to run a new cable than move the old one – which obviously only serves to compound the problem!!

This single room has around 60% off our office space and 30% of our warehouse space patched into it. So downtime windows long enough to tackle this mess are few and far between.

But, thanks to Kate and Wills, we have been graced with an extra 4 day weekend this year. So we are going to take the opportunity to recable the entire room. Several codenodes for the projects have been suggested, including “project subu”, but we eventually settled on “The Big Weekend”