May 01, 2003
Another upgrade complete
Here is the Old LAN -- installed six years ago. At the top of the rack is the fiber patch panel connecting to the Cabletron MMAC-8 hub at the bottom. It could have been built with 100 Mb/s FDDI (over 90Mb/s bandwidth) -- but the engineer overrode my suggestion and instead went with a 10 Mb/s Ethernet connection (about 4 Mb/s if its lucky) cascaded off the Cabletron MMAC-Plus in the main building.
25 pair cat-3 cables connect the Cableton to the cat-3 patch-panels (the 1RU grey jackstrips) which have cat-5 patch cables connecting them to the cat-5 (red-green-white) patch jacks and floor cables. The tall ( 2RU) jack panels were to cable to the TelCo backboard, for picking up ISDN or other voice or data circuits. Only the first 12 jacks were ever actually wired.
For the The new LAN the fibers are connecting Gigabit Ethernet between the new Cisco 5509 router/switches and the new Cisco 3524 10/100 autosense switches. The old Cabletron is gone, and the new Cisco 3524's have replaced the cat-3 patch panels. The excess never used anyhow patch facilities to the TelCo backboard has been reduced to a single panel, still only half wired.
If you look behind the rack you'll see that I even removed the old short step-ladder and the filled scrap wire bag. Not a bad wrap-up of a couple of months' efforts.