Whats the worst jury rigging you have ever come across in IT?

The_Expert

With us it was always... who needs cable management and labeling when you can pull out the good ol' Fluke Tone and Probe?

We've also ran several hundred feet of RJ-11 cable outside from one building to a new building which was under construction, so that we could get dial-tone to the elevator and receive a Certificate of Occupancy from the City. Once the inspector was gone - we removed the cable.

Management was always pushing us to get things working, even when it was their fault and lack of planning which put us in this situation in the first place. Just horrible.

ecoblue

The_Expert wrote: »

We've also ran several hundred feet of RJ-11 cable outside from one building to a new building which was under construction, so that we could get dial-tone to the elevator and receive a Certificate of Occupancy from the City. Once the inspector was gone - we removed the cable.

Eep! I wouldn't want to be in that elevator if it broke down.

mistabrumley89

We would use SM media converters for MM fiber that went through too many bends. The light would get to degraded so we just swapped a MM media converter for the SM media converter.

Verities

I've run UTP CAT cables over 100M in length, many, many times, and they still work fine. I've also run POTS lines over CAT 5e, terminating them on 66 Blocks, then running more CAT5e from said termination to credit card machines. The cabling looked horrific, since it was mostly in the open for all to see. I'll see if I can find some pictures from the phone system at that place...it runs on Windows 95 and there's twisted pair everywhere, with little or no documentation as to which extension is where.

somebrains

1) I had a facility lead tent a temporary single phase distro with garbage bags and duct tape because he couldn't read an overhead map....and the HVAC guys installed a unit with it's condensation pan right above the power.

2) Around 1999-2000 one of the SA's lost the key to the tape jukebox, and was overwriting backups.

3) Last year I had a project manager at PAX Prime grab Xbox dev kits from another studio not realizing they were configured to grab an internal and exernal IP. We were assigned about 1/2 of the IP's we needed b/c she decided to shut me out and do all of the power and data orders. She had a bipolar freak out that the data and voice vendor recorded. I'm pretty sure she was hitting the bottle pretty good schmoozing the C-level staff and throwing me under the bus b/c our demo environments weren't running for Xplay and some Twitch TV streams. Psycho contractor 1 - YouTube Psycho contractor #2 - YouTube I let her stew for a day while she was threatening to fire me while I triaged builds with the Bioshock and Xcom dev teams....then asked the d/v vendor to switch my environments over to DHCP after I got the product directors for the games to tell her to STFU. Voila, dev kits could handshake with mothership about 5mins before press time. My personal jury rig

pitviper

Verities wrote: »

I've also run POTS lines over CAT 5e, terminating them on 66 Blocks, then running more CAT5e from said termination to credit card machines.

I see this a lot - we had T1 and phone service at a location in Boston that went through 5 66-blocks before it actually hit the suite DMARC LOL

pitviper

The biggest PITA is when you hit a site where they stole a pair from the data jack for the phone – and then expect a smooth cut over to VoIP phones. I find a lot of these if not throughout the entire office, at least in a few locations here and there (a lot of times for FAX machines).

Mishra

I strapped a bunch of old cameras (most of which weren't hooked up) via zip ties and ran them with cat5 cable for power and access in a bingo hall before... I was young and just needed to get it done. I'm not too proud of that.

Verities

pitviper wrote: »

I see this a lot - we had T1 and phone service at a location in Boston that went through 5 66-blocks before it actually hit the suite DMARC LOL

Ingenuity at its finest

Kelkin

Walked into one of our clients "data centers" and found behind one of the racks someone suspended from the ceiling a series of zipstrips a PDU and of course the core switch was connected to this PDU.

Also.. same location.. someone had a floor fan pointing at one of the new Cisco wireless APs to "keep it cool".

PurpleIT

Verities wrote: »

I've run UTP CAT cables over 100M in length, many, many times, and they still work fine.

Shh... don't let anyone know that is possible!

Psst... I have even heard of people running gigabit over Cat 3.

jmritenour

Okay, I got one.

At my previous place of employment, we hosted a large number of servers for a fairly large government contractor. Logical access to these servers were by CAC, and only a select few individuals could access them. I had access to the Windows boxes, but not the Solaris machines, since I had no Solaris certs (a requirement for being granted access).

This contractor was consolidating after a hardware refresh, and wanted to relocated some Solaris servers to a different rack. They gave us a maintenance window to do it one Friday evening at 5PM. Since I'm a nice guy, I went with the Solaris engineer to relocate these servers. All he had to do was log in, shut them down, and we'd move them. Should've taken 15 minutes at most.

Now, I had heard from some of the night guys that this particular engineer always seemed to have issues accessing these systems, ie forgetting his password, locking out his CAC, etc. As soon as we walk into the data center, he hits me with his brilliant idea of NOT powering down the servers, and we'd instead yank them out of the back of the rack, only unplugging one of the two redundant power supplies at a time, and daisy chaining it from rack to rack to get into it's new location (5 racks over). His motivation for this was to "not cause the customer any downtime" (even though we had a maintenance window).

I knew right then that he didn't remember his password. So we ended up having to call the customer to get them to shut down the server remotely.