On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 08:36:45AM -0400, Joe Abley wrote:
This (the general subject of how to keep real-world cabinets tidy and do cabling in a sane way) seems like an excellent topic for a NANOG tutorial. I'd come, for sure :-)
This is a topic that I am quite interested in. I have no telco background, but got started in a shop on par with many of these photos. Around my current job, I'm the guy who is known for whining about crappy cabling jobs.
Does anyone know if any good resources on best-practices at this sort of thing? I'm pretty sure that others must've already figured out the trickier stuff that I've thought about.
For example - some of the posted pictures show the use of fiber ducts lifted above cable ladders. Why opt for such a two-level design instead of bundling fibers in flex-conduit and running the conduits adjacent on the ladder?
Design decisions for cabling will vary with the facility and actual intended uses. For example, an Internet Service Provider with significant telecom requirements may be designed quite differently than a hosting provider. Facilities where the design is not likely to change significantly are a good candidate for "tidy cabling" of the sort under discussion here, but where changes are expected to be common and frequent, there are other ways to make it look nice, without investing a ton of time just in time for next quarter's changes. The best thing you can do is to allow for what might seem to be excessive amounts of space for cable management, and then be prepared to spend TIME when installing equipment or making changes. The biggest thing that any serious cablemonkey will tell you (and I won't argue it!) is that the job takes TIME to do right. Remember that the time invested isn't being invested just to make it look good, but more importantly to make it easy to deal with when something goes wrong. Good cable guys deserve a lot of respect, for making it so easy to debug what's going on when something goes wrong. The design for your facility is best based on the unique situation present at your facility. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.