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
Today at work I had to install a switch in a rack in a riser. The riser goes from top to bottom of the building in question (5 storeys + basement). Access is through an iron door on each floor.
There is a grille to stand on, but it was slightly wobbly and nowhere near as big as the size of the riser, so I had to be careful where I was putting my feet. The building was constructed in the 1920s and the iron grille and brickwork is original.
It’s a long way to the bottom of the basement. While I was working I dropped a bolt. I heard it hit every grille as it went down, and it took about four seconds to reach the bottom.
The riser grille
Looking down the riser
Looking up the riser
This is what I was sent to work on – installing a small new switch in that tiny rack. It’s a Power-over-Ethernet switch to power some new Cisco APs that are going in soon. However, the new switch needed an uplink to the network, provided by…
The patch panel I worked on
… the Cisco switch that was bolted flat to the wall above my head, out of reach. You can see the bundle of cables that join the switch to the patch panel.
In order to reach the switch, I needed to stand on a chair. In order to get a chair to not fall through the grille, I had to go and find some pieces of wood. Yikes.
The switch mounted above
