Those are network switches, and this is 100% standard practice when decomissioning network equipment. Any time a data center is dismantled you see every single switch like this.
The reason is because every one of those runs was custom cut to length, so they will be useless in any other rack/ facility layout. Also, they all need to be pulled back through the length of the run. If you leave the RJ45 on the end they will not only not fit through a tight restriction, they will grab every single fucking slat on the cable race and cling on for dear life.
I doubt these are custom but I otherwise agree with you, though. I’ve decommed quite a few racks and the fastest way is to cut everything! Not worth the time to try to save everything because you’re most likely not reusing those patch cables
Yeah definitely not custom length, you’re not running fire alarm cabling with addressible NAC devices that needs specific resistances.
But the decommission is correct. Pulling the cable out the Jack’s need to be cut.
But those green cables have factory molded boots, not a slip on boot on a custom cut cable like the white ones in the photo?
So those green cables seem like they would be standard length patch cables and only the white is a custom cut.
You know what you’re right. I missed that. It’s still standard practice to cut them for ease of cable pulling (and because fuck unplugging umpteen bajillion of those little fuckers). They may also have just been ordered as custom sizes for the particular install so they still cant be recycled, but the big reasons for doing it are just convenience.
I mean I get it, but it still pains me to think about how many pounds of perfectly good cables get tossed for convenience. How much plastic are we producing and dumping for the sake of reducing billable hours ☹️ wish there was a better way.
Have these people never heard of service loops?
Service loops go at non-switch end of the run, otherwise you wind up with piles and piles of tabgled twisty bullshit in your network room (also it means you can move desktops around in the office floor, etc)
Randomly replugging them would’ve had the same effect possibly with the addition of arp storm or other network niceties. And would possibly take more time to actually fix than just replacing cables for which they undoubtedly have a schema somewhere.
The network schema is stored on one of the servers.
My site has no schema… Multi national medical device company, 1B in sales from this site alone last year…
Yeah it’s not “undoubted” they have a schema.
The last “small” company I worked for did a few hundred mil every year as a whole, and after spending the better part of 3 days trying to figure something out, I discovered their brilliant plan for their entire system is “contract the current cheapest outside company to set up the individual locations, don’t bother with documentation, and hope when shit finally does hit the fan the cheapest contractor we can find will be able to fix it before we lose more than a dedicated sraff would cost”
Which was not a great plan.
Loop back anyone?
Swapping the cables can be reversed with a tone generator and some time. The chopped cables probably have to be re-pulled which will take considerably longer.
He said as if whatever poor sap expected to fix it shall be given time.
These are just patch cables though, if he hasn’t cut anything in the field or behind the rack, it’s only a matter of replacing the patch cables
Good luck finding what goes where
For 99% of them it doesn’t matter because it just goes to a port on the office (sorry, open space) floor. Some of those others on the right may matter if they’re going to different devices but there’s much less and you can just rerun a cable from a device probably a rack or two over.
Don’t get me wrong, this would suck, but it wouldn’t be more than a day of work.
There could be vlans on the ports which would be a pain to setup again for the entire office.
Yes but you’re gonna have large chunks that are the same since people tend to sit in groups and ports tend to be grouped together. So you may have 3 groups rather than 1. And if you’re correctly using 802.1x it doesn’t matter as the vlans are dynamically assigned during authentication. If you’re not mature enough to be doing that you probably have a more flat layout with larger groups. Highly doubt it’d be dozens of vlans per area.
My com guys usually label the cables around 18" back.
Yes but considering they don’t have a it guy that knows what to do this damage is basically irreversible. Also its a pain in the ass.
Nonono, you see this was not a network switch, it was a bit switch where the patch cables were setting the bits for the encryption key to all the company devices. Now all is lost never to be decrypted again.
If he was any sort of smart saboteur he would have wiped the startup config, scheduled a reload in 4 hours, started a disc format on the backups server, and then left.
That’s why there should be multiple backups, at least one off-site. But it still would be a damn pain.
The kind of company that lets their IT do this isn’t going to have off-site backups either
Amateur, he should have played “hide the magnet”
Or “open the ceiling and coil copper wire around any cables in reach and make it look like they are just part of cable management”.
I’ve been petty and done this, but only to one customer who was rude, abusive and demanding. My last few weeks there I made sure to fuck up her network down to the physical level, where I was fucking up wires all over the system to only affect her. After I left, I figured the only way they were going to fix her issues, is by starting from scratch with her. Still don’t feel bad about it.
