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."

Ahh... messy racks...

Found an old picture of one of the messiest racks I have ever seen. [mtrx.net] Personally I think a messy NOC should be a punishable offense. I can't tell you how many times some stupid blip in the system is caused by a dangling wire with so much other wiring hanging on it that it gets pulled from the panel. Nothing like a 4am pager going off, coming into work and finding the root cause of the problem is the idiots that wired the rack. Kudos to those who do it right.

Re:Ahh... messy racks...

What type of install is that?

I'm no expert, but I believe that would be a cluster fuck.

Re:Ahh... messy racks...

The site is down already. http://www.talkaboutcedia.com.nyud.net:8090/articl e/10397/ [nyud.net] should get you there until it's back up.

Re:Ahh... messy racks...

>Who needs 48U of rackspace and that much cable in their HOME?

I have half that much rack gear and probably a quarter mile of audio cable, just in my modest
home recording studio. Except for my piano, I'm sure that patchbay cabling has been my largest single expense.

Re:Ahh... messy racks...

Who needs 48U of rackspace and that much cable in their HOME?

Maniacs.

Re:Ahh... messy racks...

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?

That's nothing compared to this one.

Check out this crazy yellow one [imageshack.us]. And it's yellow! :)

From AQFL [aqfl.net].

Re:That's nothing compared to this one.

Yikes. The admin for that place must be screaming each time he sees a plate of pasta!

I just imagine the face on the guy who just gets hired to maintain a place like this :)

PHB : And this is our server racks

New guy : Aeeeeiiiiii! (jumps out the window)

Re:That's nothing compared to this one.

To diffuse the bomb, cut the yellow wire.

Re:Ahh... messy racks...

CAT5 is the debbil. Krone Hi-Band 25's is what we're using to the wall (grocery retail chain). Great stuff. Nothing worse than two or three hundred CAT5 cables coming out of a rack.

Old story -- Long time ago a Vax 785 / RS232x9600 installation in Tasmania had a problem with perfect crosstalk -- one VT220 terminal was displaying & accepting keypresses identical to the one on a desk near it, with the latter terminal being unplugged from the computer. Turned out the cables were bound together neatly along their entire length, and the bits just jumped across inductively.

Re:Ahh... messy racks...

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.

Re:Work to be found

I know this is not going to be a popular opinion but..
Tightly bound cable bundles at the rack are NOT helping anyone but the anal person looking at the pretty pictures. Try troubleshooting or replacing a wire in that bundle at the rack. A rack is a dynamic environment, that is why there are jacks there! If it was not meant to be dynamic, why even use jacks at the rack? Just hard wire everything. If your rack is attached to the floor, movement and cable chafing is not a problem either. If you have to spend more then 5 minutes to get the bundle the way it looked before you replaced a wire at the rack level, you are wasting every ones time including your own to get it to look absolutely perfect. There is NOTHING wrong from a technical standpoint by using the plain old cable management hooks on the front of a typical rack that the cables route through, each wire does not need to be zip tied or Velcro every few inches and each wire spreading off of the bundle with a cable tie for each one, in fact, you can cross over the width of a typical 19 inch rack without the need for any additional bundling other then standard wire management trays and hooks. Side rack mounting depends on type of management you have for that, I've seen some better then others.

Like I said, my opinion is not going to be a popular one but can someone give me a technical reason why every rj45 plug in something like a 24 port blade needs to tied individually or even in groups of two? Is that "unsafe"? Is it a hazard in your environment? If so, what the hell is going on in your equipment room and why do you not have a door on your rack? Is it harder to track down then a huge bundle 20 deep and zip tied to 10ft lbs every 3 inches?

Oddly enough, I've seen many installations where the rack looked pristine but the out of sight areas or covered parts for the actual runs like under floor or overhead in partially covered trays or inside the rack vertical sections looked like spaghetti. If your goal is neatness and you justify the clean rack area for some technical reason, what is your excuse for the other areas that are out of normal sight looking like crap, do those technical reasons for a pristine rack not apply to areas others can not easily see? In order to get the rack to look nice, the extra cabling is balled up and hidden elsewhere. It does not make sense.

For reference, I do neat work now and I've had to replace and re bundle cables and wires inside nuclear reactor instrumentation control panels and rack mounted electronic instrumentation shelves using nylon string and shellac so I am very familiar with the concept and the goals of proper wire management.

Re:Site's down and only 3 comments?

"Also, the editor put an incorrect link in."

Guess he got his wires crossed ...

nyud mirror

http://www.talkaboutcedia.com.nyud.net:8090/articl e/10397/ [nyud.net] and here's another mirror [driftwood-dreams.co.uk]

forgive me if this is a dumb question

but can a linksys wireless router actually work inside of a steel cabinet?

Re:forgive me if this is a dumb question

Polarisation of the radio waves makes it harder for clients to connect to the AP that is sitting at a wierd angle.

The problem with polarization is that you can't say for sure which way the mobile antenna will be pointing, so you can't make any blanket pronouncements about what constitutes "ideal orientation" for all occasions. PCMCIA wireless adapters have the antenna horizontal. Many integrated laptop wireless cards mount the antenna vertical in the LCD housing. The worst polarization for vertical receiver is a horizontal transmitter, and vice-versa. Placing the base station antennas at 45 degree angles from horizontal, and 90 degrees relative to each other gives you the greatest possible coverage of potential polarities of mobile antennas. You're unlikely to exactly match the polarity of the mobile (best), but you're also unlikely to end up with them at 90 degrees to one another (worst).

Re:forgive me if this is a dumb question

[offtopic]

If you know that "begs the question" doesn't mean "raises the question", then why didn't you just say "raises the question"? Wouldn't that have been a lot simpler then posting a footnote?

Because I actually used "begs the question" in its proper meaning, i.e. a circular argument. The post I responded to asked whether Linksys wireless routers would work inside a metal box; this begs the question (assumes without evidence) that the Linksys wireless router works at all.
[/offtopic]

Only on Slashdot...

...Can one create a duplicate within the same submission.

Neatness is good, but ...

... 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 [monash.edu.au], 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 ...)

Looks good ONCE, and only once.

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.

Re:Looks good ONCE, and only once.

That's exactly what I was thinking while looking at those pictures.

Half of the purpose of having neat wiring is maintainability (in addition to aesthetics, air flow, and just plain keeping crap out of the way of other things). That setup is almost as unmaintainable as a wall draped in spaghetti. I at least hope they either have good documentation kept up to date to match the small fortune and abundant time they spent on zip-ties or else have both ends of their cables labeled so they know which cable to yank once they do cut all those zip ties, because you aren't going to trace those out by hand.

I guess if your system is perfect and you have no need to ever replace equipment or expand, this is fine, but for the rest of us, give us some service loops and removable wire clips.

Re:Looks good ONCE, and only once.

You'd have to cut 50 different ties...

Indeed. Where I work, we use velcro ties to solve this problem. They can still be a pain in the ass, but it's a lot easier than cutting and re-tying every time you need to move a cable.

Nice wiring is great and all

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).

Re:Nice wiring is great and all

That's why they invented PATCH PANELS - the wiring coming into/out of the rack is bundled, and goes to the patch panel - NEVER to an item in the rack - in fact, even wiring intra rack goes via a panel

Cheap does it.

Back in the days when RS-232C ruled, I was in charge of wiring, and our department always made fun of another department's propensity at overspending and buying expensive gadgets.

When they wired their mainframe, they spent about $2000 for a bunch of bix panels.

When it was my turn to do the same job, I took $5.00 and went to the hardware store, I picked up a 1ft by 4fr plywood scrap and bought a box of finishing nails and brought that in the office (the canadian head-office of a fortune 500 company, btw) and started hammering away neat rows of nails to which I soldered wires from a 100 pair cable we ran between two floors.

On hearing the hammering, the boss of the other department (who happenned to pass by by chance) came to have a peek, and he sees me hammering and soldering and asks me "what are you doing???"

- I'm doing a patchboard for the serial lines.

- Why don't you use a BIX board like we did in the plant?

- Because yours cost $2000 and mine only $5.00.

He left without saying a word.

he mentioned RS232

I honestly don't think that it was much of a problem for RS232 communication (i.e. high-voltage, relatively low frequency).

Re:Cheap does it.

And then it caused impedance issues which you didn't even know existed!
But it worked as far as you know, right?
I mean, all those equations and stuff don't matter, it's just wires. If they connect then everything is fine. Did you ever wonder though, why does an EE degree take 4 years to get when you can just hammer some nails?

If you have had a EE degree, you would know that RS-232c is +/-12 volts, and at that time (20 years ago), the maximum speed the mainframe could work at was 9600 baud, so that's 104 microseconds per cycle, worst case.

So no, it did not have any impedance issues.

And yes, it worked fine, and did so for the next 15 years.

EE can't let ignorance go unpunished!

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".

As much as I appreciate a good education...

... sometimes it has a tendency to get to your head. You didn't get your EE degree for hammering some nails to string RS-232C, any more than a doctor gets their degree to treat a common cold in a healthy 8-year old. In the same fashion, I didn't get my CS degree to write Swing UIs. Did our educations tangentially cover these things? Yep, they did, but they're a) not our core competencies and b) can be done by someone who is literate and capable of following a simple single sheet of instructions.

Why are our degrees important? Well, one thing they let us do is properly identify edge cases. A self taught programmer implementing a Swing UI with a sorted combobox might decide to use a bubblesort on it, which would work fine through testing right until it got to a customer who put a couple hundred items in it, when the application would just start to unexpectedly hang. The doctor hopefully catches that 1 kid out of 10,000 who doesn't actually have the cold and needs treatment within the next 48 hours to save his life. And you, as an electrical engineer, identify when impedence would be an issue.

Ah, but here's the rub: edge cases are edge cases for a reason, and purported experts who cry wolf regarding the edge cases get ignored by a public which sees solutions which work perfectly for 2.5% of the price. And, as several folks have pointed out, you're crying wolf here. The reason the solution appears to work isn't because the grandparent was ignorant of impedence, its because its just physically impossible for that to be a problem for that device.

Or, as I learned in Engineering school (in tech writing, of all places): "You're going to graduate with a degree from one of the best schools in the country, and you'll be working your first job with tech-school grads who have 15 years of experience, and in your first two weeks one of them is going to say something you learned in school is wrong. You might disagree, perhaps vehemently. But before you voice your disagreement, figure out exactly why he thinks his way will work, because odds are it will. Remember: he's worked there for 15 years and hasn't blown it yet, or he wouldn't still be there."

One of my favorite messy racks

Here is a picture of a site in Dallas, TX. This picture belongs to a HUGE telecom company. A baby bell if you will. ;) How they maintain this I will never know. http://www.waystupid.com/item-378.htm What is more amazing is that after several attempts by staffers, the management refuses to let people clean this up. And they show this to prospective customers on a daily basis!!! [waystupid.com]

Neat != Usable

I'd actually argue that although some of the wire racks pictured look nice they're unusable - you'd have to snip all of those zip-ties to trace a cable. If letting the cable lie in the wire management isn't good enough Velcro would be better, and less likely to be over tightened to the point of pulling the cat5 twists out of spec.

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.

Re:Neat != Usable

Exactly, you need to be able to get to any cable. Zip ties are single use. Velcro rip ties, while more expensive, are reusuable.

And talk about overkill on that one 24 port switch or whatever it was. They used at least 24 zip ties, one for each cable and some doubles. Don't you think one every 2-4 would have done just as good a job? Instead, they completely locked down the cable making any troubleshooting a nightmare. Three well placed ripties would do a fine job, keep it orderly AND maintainable. Especially if the ties were long enough to have additional room for growth.

Re:Neat != Usable

What you fail to grasp -- along with everyone else who's posted in the thread so far, if the comments are any judge -- is that these are AV gear racks, NOT computer/network/phone racks.

CEDIA == Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association. These people install home theatres, integrated audio systems, etc.

Re:Neat != Usable

It is hard sometimes to make service loops look neat, but they're absolutely worth any clutter they cause.

Of course, with a little creativity it's often possible to bundle everything up so that one or two snips releases plenty of extra length.

My "favorite" though is people who pull fibre cables "nice and tight" then zip them within an inch of their lives while the equipment is warm. As soon as it's powered off for a few hours, fibres start breaking. It sure looks pretty until you have to cut a zillion ties to do anything.

Someone had to say it

I'd like to be a judge on that panel. I'd love to give out awards for the best rack.

What? Wiring? What are you talking about? Oh...

I'm in trouble now.

While viewing the article, my wife overheard me saying, "Ooh, nice rack on that one.

Re:I'm in trouble now.

Heh, best story I have comes from Comdex/Interop.

Wandering around away from my display (armed with booty to trade, mugs for penguins etc) I came across 2 middle aged IT geeks checking out some glorious powdercoated, properly cooled, neatly wired and well laid out rack equipment on display.

As they were tinkering with the offerings one was heard to pronounce "what a great rack, wouldn't you love one in your home".

At this point the poor unsuspecting geek was set upon by one of the very well endowed skimpily clad models hired to parade around and lure in the punters, who promptly slapped him across the face and berated the poor confused fellow (who had that mix of deer in the headlights and WHA!! look on his face) for being a "misogynist pig" etc etc.

Took 2 hours for my sides to stop hurting...

You know what is missing?

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)

The Obsessive and Aging

You know, those with obsessive compulsive disorder can get really really bad about it... or get over it.

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.

Re:The Obsessive and Aging

You're totally right. That's something I've learned at my new job. I was always trying to do things perfectly, and I realized that it took too long to do them as well as I wanted, and even then they wouldn't be *perfect*. I thought back to my metals class when my teacher talked about the level of accuracy which is necessary for particular jobs, and how you wouldn't build a house while measuring lengths in micrometers just as you wouldn't build an engine while measuring in inches. (I forget the name of the principle, I was in Jr. High.)

What really drove that point home was when somebody plugged an ethernet switch into itself a few weeks after I'd done a moderately good wiring job in our closet and I had to tear it all out because I couldn't even get to our management console on the switch to see which port was causing the traffic storm. (Netgear FSM750S if you want to know.) So, just as many people had pointed out, my zip-tied bundle of cables did me no good and they are now hanging off the side of the switch in a mess, no longer matched up to the numbers on the patch panel.

I guess it really does matter what kind of job you're doing... If you're not going to be changing anything, zip tying it all up might make sense. They staple AC wires inside the walls of houses, so I'm sure we can find an instance where zipping up cables would be appropriate. For me though, I'll take velcro and a slight mess.

This article sponsored by. . .

This article sponsored by; ZipCo International.
Manufacturers of the worlds most reliable and most costly zip-ties!
Organize your wiring cabinet today! You can never use enough zip-ties!

Broadcast TV

Your average network TV station has wiring that puts any telecomm to shame. I've seen patchbays just in control rooms that have far more going on than anything in the photos on the CEDIA website. That stuff *has* to be organized. Just the labelling systems are amazing, let alone the craftsmanship involved in wiring them.

With all due modesty...

... I feel I am the worst wiring technician on the planet. All I have to do is look at a cable to get it tangled!

Maintainability

The discussions of maintainability reminded me of a funny story.

At the first company I started, we had an excellent ops fellow who did all our wiring. The racks were immaculate, on par with the the winners in the competition. We never found maintainability a major factor, as things were wired right, and patch panels routed things as changes dictated.

However, on one occasion, I do remember his obsessive compulsive approach annoying. We were doing some moving around, so he was coming in and out of my office every few minutes for various changes, as was I. I typically don't screw in my monitor (or other cables), because, well, I don't need to, and I often change things around. Anyhow, the work I was doing that day involved plugging the monitor into a few different units to check things out. At one point, I couldn't remove it from the PC. It had been screwed in. I undid it, and moved it to the next PC I was checking, went to the bathroom. When I came back, I couldn't remove it, it had been screwed in again. Every time my employee walked by, he was screwing the monitor cable in tight, the way it "should be." This went on for about four or five times. The fact he even spotted it was amazing, much less the inability to walk by it without "fixing" it.

No labels, no good

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.