How a Wiring Rack Should Look 357
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... (Score:5, Funny)
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Also why is there a shop light hung in the middle?
Re:Ahh... messy racks... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm no expert, but I believe that would be a cluster fuck.
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In a collocation facility that used to allow customer to rack their own gear... yeah, how ever bad the rack looks in your imagination at this point - double that. Now we strongly suggest they allow us to do it the first time, or we shut them down and do it over - and it typically takes about 150% more time.
I can appreciate the neat and clean wiring/racking job - for a full 48u rack with 1U servers and network gear- expect about 15-25 hours of labor to get all the
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Clean install requires hand terminated cables (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want a really nice looking install, you need to terminate yourself.
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Factory or Field? Depends on the situation... (Score:3, Interesting)
For data centers, all the really good installs I have seen use factory-made trunks going to patch panels interconnected with factory-made patches. This gives you MUCH more flexibility than point-to-point cabling, and makes box installs go much faster when you can just break out a crate of
Re:Ahh... messy racks... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Ahh... messy racks... (Score:4, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
Maniacs.
Re:Ahh... messy racks... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's nothing compared to this one. (Score:5, Informative)
From AQFL [aqfl.net].
Re:That's nothing compared to this one. (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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Sadly, this looks a lot like the wiring I've seen at some big LAN-parties.
Re:That's nothing compared to this one. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Ahh... messy racks... (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
nyud mirror (Score:5, Informative)
forgive me if this is a dumb question (Score:3, Insightful)
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* [wikipedia.org]
Re:forgive me if this is a dumb question (Score:4, Funny)
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]
Re:forgive me if this is a dumb question (Score:5, Informative)
Dupe Link? (Score:2)
Only on Slashdot... (Score:5, Funny)
Neatness is good, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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You don't - that's the back of the rack you're looking at, not the front of the patch-panel...
(And if you do need to change a subrack for something different, you pretty much have to replace all the cabling anyway.)
Having said that, those pics look like nothing more than (what us
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Nice wiring is great and all (Score:4, Insightful)
Dynamic environment... (Score:2)
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But golly, this is electronics. Why would you need to change anything?
Re:Nice wiring is great and all (Score:5, Informative)
Cheap does it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Your solution is the perfect example of "penny wise, pound foolish".
he mentioned RS232 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cheap does it. (Score:5, Informative)
So no, it did not have any impedance issues.
And yes, it worked fine, and did so for the next 15 years.
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a whole bunch of three-prong extension cords and XON/XOFF handshaking.
That worked fine, too, although 9600bps wasn't always achievable. But I was always worried somebody would actually plug one in to an electrical outlet while the end was still attached to my terminal in another building....
EE can't let ignorance go unpunished! (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
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As much as I appreciate a good education... (Score:5, Interesting)
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."
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Surprisingly few people are capable of reading a simple sheet of
One of my favorite messy racks (Score:4, Interesting)
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I was worried for a second (Score:2)
But then I remembered I wasn't on Fark.
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Having worked for a telecom (one that might just have had the biggest bankruptcy in history), I went to one of their main voice switching centers and was shown an entire room that looked like this. When I asked why in the world we had an entire room that was just cable loops that went from a DEMUX board to a MUX board, he told me that federal law requires them to break out every signal that trav
Neat != Usable (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
CEDIA == Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association. These people install home theatres, integrated audio systems, etc.
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Re:Neat != Usable (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Low-voltage wiring (Score:2)
120 volt wiring is the easiest (Score:2)
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Bad wiring made me less pretty (Score:2)
Having seen these pics, I think I'll go and re-do all my cabling...I feel inspired by these mush bigger, yet even neater seups.
Someone had to say it (Score:5, Funny)
What? Wiring? What are you talking about? Oh...
I'm in trouble now. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm in trouble now. (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Don't Do It *TOO* Perfect (Score:2)
Leave some slack!
And don't wire wrap every half an inch!
Nothing worse that a bunch of Cat5 cable cut too close that you can't even change the switch out with a different model because the jacks are in different places and the cable is too short. Or the patch panel is flaky and needs to be swaped out, but there's not an inch of slack!
You know what is missing? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Wow, now I'm embarrased... (Score:2)
Never mind the wires, look at the final projects! (Score:2)
Yes, all the bundles of coloured wires look nice. But holy mother of home theatre, check out the links to the project pages [cedia.net]!
Might be an ok place to watch a flick. [cedia.net]
This is what a hardcore geek does when he sells his dotcom to Microsoft. [cedia.net]
Re:Never mind the wires, look at the final project (Score:2)
But seriously. That second system has got to be *loud*. Those Crown amps are meant for huge auditorium-sized PA systems.
And there's at least 7 of them in that system.
Whiz Kids... (Score:2)
Too Neat? (Score:2)
This is a BIG reason for virtual machines (Score:2)
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This article sponsored by. . . (Score:3, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
That's nice. Mine's like that.. (Score:2)
With all due modesty... (Score:3, Funny)
Maintainability (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Site's down and only 3 comments? (Score:5, Funny)
"Also, the editor put an incorrect link in."
Guess he got his wires crossed ...
you expect the site to stay up... (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Work to be found (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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(no I don't know either how they could help)
OTOH there are some U shaped nails that are wide enough for CAT5 cabling. I've used those before.
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Very simple solution I have been using for years (Score:3, Informative)
Cut it to size and drop on the floor behind equipment or under your desk, or screw down where required. Best use separate ones for
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Yeah. If only there were some magical technology that could notice that the induced EMF is in the same phase on the two legs, and with some sort of amplifier, find a differential signal that would remove it.
If I ever invent one, I'll call it a magic-signal-sorter.