Networking Nightmare!

2/22/2017

This was one of the worst cabling situations we had come across in awhile. Our company inherited this closet when we took over support. It got this way because they had more cabling in the building than they had switches, so whenever a port needed turned on they physically moved the wire in this rack. Over years of doing this, it turns into...a networking nightmare! All the panels were off on the sides, and the cable management systems were not being used. We were able to obtain a few more switches to do it right so we went to work. It took two engineers four days to complete this with the goal of keeping the building online and re-wiring over 320 drops. Below are the pictures at the end of each day. Day 1 we spent mapping every drop and moved active ports to a bank of switches out of the rack to keep operations alive. Day 2 we actually started the process of rebuilding the rack and continued through Day 3 until the final result on Day 4.