Re: Good Stuff [was] Re: shameful-cabling gallery of infamy - does anybody know where it went?

[Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net>]

> 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.