July 02, 2008
Dead dreams
Here is the rack lineup as I left it, ready for people to run my floor cables to. Rack one, far end, holds a 30amp ups, the incoming routers for the LAN, RCAP, Fiber switches, and the patch panel to the TE1. As you can see, over half the rack is empty for future growth/rearrangements.
Rack two has a 20 amp ups to power the ethernet switches. Racks two and three hold: voice jacks from the backboard, floor jacks, LAN switch, floor jacks, voice jacks, floor jacks . . . . This arrangement allows 99% of the patch cords to be a short 12" up/down -- no tangled mass of patch cables between racks.
Finally, rack four has the big 8540 router that connects the roughly 200 phone lines supplied by the Avaya Media Gateway. Again, lots of room for additions/rerrangements. At the top of the rack is my coax patch to the DS3 demarc on the first floor.
A clean and simple plan that makes troubleshooting a piece of cake -- mainly because there is no trying to trace or rearrange a patch cable buried in a huge ugly mass.
This is roughly how the racks looked on Monday. Today I managed to get time from my workload to check in and this is what I found:
Rather than simply terminate the cables on the designated patch panels, the fucking assholes decided to totally destroy all of my efforts.
They moved ALL of the LAN equipment into the Avaya rack, totally filling the rack so it will be impossible to add/rearrange anything in the future. They ALSO neglected to consider power requirements, leaving the LAN's 30 amp UPS back in Rack one.
They then moved all of the voice patch jacks and Ethernet switches into Rack two. They spaced the floor jacks out and place horizonal cable management in between the jack fields.
The way I laid out the racks I didn't NEED any horizonal cable management as all I used to connect LAN and Voice to the floor cables were short vertical jumpers. My 400 short cords can be tossed into the trash -- not usable with the abortion they have come up with. They need the horizonal management 'cause they will be using 6 to 8 foot long cables, 300-400 of them, woven into a tangled mass to be hidden behing the cable management covers.
Why they felt they had to totally fuck up a perfectly good layout I don't know, nor care.
The Boss said, "Let it Go!" So I have. They have taken over the whole project as I am not about to try to make their stupid mess work.
Required two hours of vibration therapy before I calmed down enough to feel safe from a heart attack from the stress.