If you are a maintenance staff, when you see this scene, how would you feel?

I thought this might be relevant to this thread.

About a year ago, I was doing an office move. The wiring company was one that none of us had worked with before and it made us all nervous since this huge move had to be done on an aggressive time frame. We gave them strict instructions, a port matrix, color scheme for wiring (white = utility port, blue = data, etc), milestones and dates, etc

Long story short, the wiring vendor still hadn't punched down everything or patched at all a week before the move. They ended up rushing through the patching, messing up the matrix, and having a port failure rate of 20%. Since we couldn't push back the move, we temporarily had to live with THIS in 3 different IDFs:

For years and years of tweaking and other nonsense, the above might not be a big surprise but for a brand new office??????!!!!!!

I spent three weeks at the end of last year toning cables, labeling, and repatching to make those three IDFs look like this:

It is not glamorous work by any means but I'm damn proud of it. I made sure every patch cable was labeled on the top and bottom with what blade/switchport and patch panel number it was connected to, each port as logically labeled and configured appropriately, and there was a USB backup of the configuration of the switches off to the side. I doubt anyone will keep it up now that I'm gone but I left them with the tools!

IDF1.jpg

IDF2.jpg

darkerosxx

^^^ very nice work!

DevilWAH

Hats of to your IristheAngel.

I cant say I have ever done it that neatly, very nice

Iristheangel

I will admit that I didn't do it all alone. I brought in a couple of hired hands to help me out since it was a massive amount of work but I owned it and did a lot of the grunt work. The only other network engineer refused to have anything to do with it.

cgrimaldo

Nice work, Iris! One of our IDF's is due for a clean-up. I may have to poke and prod you for some helpful hints.

VAHokie56

One of my first network gigs was a closet refresh project, we would do all the logical work (moved switches from l2 @ the edge to l3) and the cable guys would to the physicals. So when they would remove the old 4510's from the closet they would just use sheers to cut all the patch cables about 1 inch from the switch. They all ended up looking like hairy switches...kind of funny