April 28, 2003
The past haunting....
I've been working OCS since the late 1980's. One of my first LAN installations was for a couple of workstations and a printer over at 2154. When it went in originally it consisted of a GDC-500c 56Kb/s 4-wire ADN feeder circuit, a Cisco 1000 router, and an Ungermann-Bass 24-port 10baseT hub. The specification for 10baseT was that it was designed to work on existing telephone wiring -- and that was what I used.
This circuit was bridged out of Hollywood, along with many others. After a couple of years the number of users on the LANs increased to the point where the heartbeats from all of the devices exceded the 56K bandwidth and effectively shut the LAN down. A quick upgrade to T1 feed circuits fixed that.
A few years later a group moved in on the 2nd floor and built a more modern LAN with a pair of T1s and a pair of Cisco 2500's and 3COM switches. A fiber was run to the downstairs closet and the UB2400 was replaced by a 3COM and the GDC and Cisco1000 removed.
Somewhere about the same time ASI moved into a part of the 1st floor and tapped into the LAN. Some cat-5 cables were run. Some cat-3 cables were re-used, and it looks as if there is still an existing connection on pairs 22 & 23 of a 25-pair KTS telephone station cable.
In the picture you can see the new 3COM hub on a wire shelf (pulled from a company van) sitting above the KTS units and power supply, the mix of cat-3 and cat-5 cabling. To the left of the shelf that ugly mass of wire is the feeder cable from the basement mainframe (this is an old operator services building with what used to be a small switchroom in the basement.) A close look will reveal a couple of the cables are carrying two LAN circuits -- not quite acceptable wiring practices.
I'll be upgrading to new Cisco switches in the near future, along with migrating and upgrading the wiring to a proper cat-5 patch panel that will meet current company standards. Not visible in the picture was a second KTS rack mounted on the wall above the Hub. I spent today removing that hub and now have a clear 27 inch wide by 3-4 feet tall clear backboard for mounting the cat-5 patch.