Jonathan's blog

A while back I wrote about the worst cabinet ever.

Maybe this one isn’t as spectacular to behold, but there is a Cisco switch under all that spaghetti. There are also two PoE power injectors for wireless access points. All this is in a wooden cupboard and it was roasting hot.

You can see that they also haven’t bothered to install a patch board – instead there are just wall sockets covering the side, and a few lying around not attached to anything.

At the back, there’s a telephone patch panel too.

New worst cabinet ever

Recently at work I had to go out on site to visit a comms cabinet.  I followed the directions to the cabinet, but when I got there I found it was in a tiny closet, not deep enough for a rack.

So it seems that whoever installed the network improvised. There’s an ancient 10Mbit hub, a 48-port Cisco switch and an 8-port Linksys power-over-Ethernet switch all suspended from their network cables. The PoE switch even had its heavy power supply hanging from it, too.

Switches hanging from their cables

Switches hanging from their cables

And if that’s not bad enough, check out the telephone patch panel in the same cabinet…

Telephone patch panel