Article: Abandoned Cable Removal A Dogged Challenge For All Cabling Installatin & Maintenance Magazine By Patrick McLaughlin | July 2007 Issue http://preview.tinyurl.com/32cfak -- As an aside, legend has it that some of the larger skyscrapers in NY City would crumble under the weight of the cables installed inside them --particularly coaxial and proprietary mutli-pair cable runs that were used for market data services and desktop video displays prior to the proliferation of Ethernet over fiber backbones-- running up and down vertical riser shafts, were it not for the bracing and additional structural supports installed after the fact to support them. Frank --- On Wed Sep 12 10:10 , Joe Greco sent:

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If you find any pictures of NY.NET; Terry Kennedy made the above look sloppy. Many places ban cable ties due to the sharp ends; some allow 'em if tensioned by a pistol-grip installer.

The tie gun is a good solution, but quite frankly, you don't need one to do a good job with cable ties. This is mainly a training issue, and the training is substantially easier than training folks to use lacing cord. The rule doesn't need to be much more than "clean cut required, if you can't do a clean cut, then leave the tail on."

Xcelite makes some fantastic tools, as anyone in this business should know, and they have a wide selection of full flush cutters that will work fine. There are some other manufacturers who make this sort of cutter, of course, but they're a bit tricky to find. The key thing is that people learn not to just use any old wire cutters to snip these.

If you're really good, and the situation allows, you can use a knife or box cutter to trim ends as well.

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Terry required lacing cord. You can guess his heritage.

That's mostly a pain to do. Looks nice, but hell to modify, and more time and effort to install initially.

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As for horror stories, a certain ISP near here that started out in a video store had piles of Sportsters. The wall warts were lined up and glued dead-bug style to a number of long 1x3's; then #14 copper was run down each side, daisy-chain soldered to each plug blade. There was no attempt to insulate any of upright plugs...

ExecPC, here in Wisconsin, had a much more elegant solution. ExecPC BBS was the largest operating BBS in the world, with a large LAN net and a PC per dial-in line. They had built a room with a custom rack system built right in, where a motherboard, network, video, and modem card sat in a slot, making a vertical stack of maybe 8 nodes, and then a bunch of those horizontally, and then several rows of those. That was interesting all by itself, but then they got into the Internet biz early on.

They had opted to go with USR Courier modems for the Internet stuff. Being relatively "cheap", they didn't want to go for any fancier rack mount stuff (== much more expensive). So they went shopping. They found an all metal literature rack at the local office supply store that had 120 slots (or maybe it was two 60 slot units). They took a wood board and mounted it vertically above the unit. This held a large commercial 120-to-24vac step-down transformer and a variac that was used to trim the AC voltage down to the 20VAC(?) needed by the Couriers.

Down the backside, they ran a run of wide finger duct vertically. Inside this, they ran two thick copper bars that had been drilled and tapped 120 times by a local machine shop. When connected to the step-down transformer's output, this formed the power backbone. They had a guy snip the power cables off the Courier wall warts, and spade lug them, and screwed them in. Instant power for 120 modems.

Slip a modem in each slot. Run phone wire up to one of five AllenTel AT125-SM's hanging on the back of the plywood, and there you have 5 25pr for inbound. Run serial cables up to one of four Portmaster PM2E-30's sitting on top of the racks, then network to a cheap Asante 10 megabit hub, and you're done. 5 x 25pr POTS in, power in, ethernet out, standalone 120 line dialin solution.

Multiply solution by 10 and you get to the biggest collection of Courier modems I've ever seen.

They continued to do this until the advent of X2, which required T1's to a Total Control chassis, at which point they started to migrate to rackmount gear (they had no space to go beyond 1200 analog Couriers anyways).

... 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.