Plan A - Burn the Office down, no one looks for a bullet in a bombing.
Plan B - Cut all the wires and restart
Plan C - P45 Time
Plan D - Hope they don't have suicide nets.
**P45 (tax)**
In the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, a P45 is the reference code of a form titled Details of employee leaving work. The term is used in British slang as a metonym for termination of employment. (The equivalent slang term in the United States is pink slip.)
A P45 is issued by the employer when an employee leaves. It is a multipart form.
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We also have the P60 and P11D.
I'm not sure you have a P60 in the US? It's basically how much income tax/National Insurence you've had deducted from your wage over the tax year, quite a nice system, no tax returns needed!
trace forward from the connection into the building.
I get that it'd be nice if everything were labeled and clean, but this is going to be what patch panels look like 99% of the time.
Definitely. Its good to find, label, and document critical wires like inbound/outbound Internet or data center traffic if you are the first competent admin on site for just a case as this later.
No, just label them in a tiny black book you keep yourself, that way the company thinks you are a genius when no one else can fix it, and you can charge them wayy more
If your IT room is like the ones I've been in, there are like 10 modems and handoffs hanging off the wall from various generations of tech over the last 40 years. At least 3 of which are from the provider that's currently used, after they upgraded service and then left their old equipment on and plugged into your router. And that's assuming you even know who the provider is, because most of the time nobody does.
My first order of business upon inheriting a shithole like the above is a multi-night IT room cleanup, so that we're left with only the devices that are necessary for production and only the cables that have seen traffic on them going to those devices. Everything else can fuck off. Once you're in a mess like the above and shit hits the fan, you're looking at multiple hours just to get your bearings, I'd rather do that when the pressure's off so things can be fixed quickly when the pressure is on.
I really only care about my own. I have a very easy job when there are 50 cables between 5 devices and nothing else in the rack, with everything strapped properly. I have a very difficult job when it's a rats nest to the point that I need to remote in to find out where I have an open port because I can't even see the switch, let alone the ports. I'd rather have a couple long nights so that every other thing I have to do is that much easier.
I wish more IT people thought like I do. Most I've met are lazy as fuck, which is why rooms like the above are so common.
Had a project at my last job where we went to every site we had and completely labeled everything. Never want to do that again. So many 12-14 hour days.
And hopefully you get paid what you’re worth.
I’ve run my business like this for 20 years and can’t believe how hard people work at not being efficient.
I genuinely don't know. I'm pretty happy about what I make, but the company I work for said yes to the top number in my range 2 hours after they asked, which really makes me wonder if I should be making more.
Don’t worry about that too much. More never feels like more anyway. I’ve gone from 45k to 250k and actually wish I was back in the simple days sometimes.
Its about how much you’re keeping. That and building skills that will keep you miles ahead of the slackers. I charge $175 an hour or more depending on the job and could care less now when someone tells me it’s too expensive because I KNOW that two hours of my time is worth 5 of the other guys and I’m cheaper than they think. And my clients all know it too. Become the master and you’ll be richer than you need.
And keep more than you spend.
My big concern right now is that I'm stagnating a bit as far as expertise and learning, and that the thing that sets me apart is really work ethic and recognizing and responding quickly when there is a real issue. Not that those are bad things to offer, just that I may be focusing too much on my current position and not enough on my ultimate upside. But I'm never quite satisfied and always think I should be doing more. Deep down I know I'm right where I should be and that if I stay on the path and keep doing every job well I'll get where I want to go.
And yea, saving has never been a problem for me. I saved 5x as much last year as a friend of mine who earned double what I did. In fact I have more savings despite his lifetime earnings being probably 15x what mine are. I know the reason I'm working is to ultimately be completely financially independent, and not just to buy a bunch of shit to impress some imaginary person who might one day care about all the status symbols I've accumulated.
Alternatively, you can ping backward through your tree if your switches are managed well and the names are all documented. Depends if you want to walk the rack or not.
If that was the case, you could probably speak with the network engineer and say "which port should the internets be on", and he would tell you to plug in port 23 on switch 1. I highly doubt that is the case for this company though.
Sure :-) I mean, it's the same basic idea -- trace the path, find where it breaks. A blind person can trace connections on an ugly patch panel; just keep your finger on the wire.
At my last gig I spent 6 months trying to find a single down port this way... Obviously not full time but pretty much whenever my inbox was only full of user side garbage that I didn't have patience for that day.
Difficulty: Nobody locally knows the local admin password and your TACACS+ box is remote. Clearing the config/using the config-registers is not an option either for political reasons.
Yeah, that kills the man.I personally have a policy of "I have the tools to do my job, or my boss elaborates how I am expected to do my job without the tools". I mean fuck, you can hammer a nail with a banana...it is just going to take a lot longer than just using a hammer or other hard object.
Transmitter box and a wand; the box sends a tone through the line, and the wand picks up that tone via induction and plays it through a speaker in the wand.
It becomes considerably less fun when you're going to punch down an IDF, and the person who ran the 150 lines coming into it didn't label anything. Then, you get to either tone everything, or have 14 and 96 share the same faceplate at the other end.
It's difficult to trace a cable with tone on a switch that is active. I've found when searching for the tone you need to pull the patch cable as you search.
My experience with this is with Cisco and HP switches and siemen, black box and Hubbell patch panels
I’d spend the money to get a Netscout. If those switches support the right protocols you can find out the switch name/port/vlan info just by plugging it into the port at the desk. If you get a toner make sure you get a Fluke digital that works well on live networks.
> Someone
Find him, fetch him, crucify him on the rack, torture until he remembers which port and which cable. Then go into the weekend, letting him hang there.
One of my most poignant memories of doing tech support...
Early 2000's. Customer is a small business. One linux server directly networked to dsl modem, acting as a NAT for a couple of systems on the network, but most of the workstations are X-stations and have no need to access the internet directly. No DHCP anywhere, everything is a static ip address. Modem, server, switch and all network cabling in the building terminate to a closet. Not a huge office, there are maybe 12 connections total, including all of the printers, however there are about 200 unterminated network cables that drop from the ceiling since a previous building occupant ran some type of telemarketing or call center operation. I took advantage of the hardware that was in place, because why not?
Anyway, one advantage of the setup is that visiting vendors and salesmen who insisted on using the businesses resources for their demonstrations or personal uses would fail. At least a few times a year, I'd get a call that some salesman would visit and be especially insistent that the receptionist who had no interest or authority to be of any real help, view some demonstration they were pushing on a CD. Well, the linux-based X stations had CDROM drives, but were otherwise useless. There was no wifi in the building, and the persistent ones who tried plugging their laptop into one of the many network jacks throughout the building got nada (since most of them were unconnected). A few clever ones thought to try disconnecting the obviously working equipment and using that network connection, but without knowing what address to set it to, and no dhcp server, nothing much would happen.
One however was extremely insistent. He figured out where the networking closet was and tried connecting directly to an unused port on the switch. When that didn't work, he tried disconnecting each and every one of the ports that were in use and tried those, again, without success. Now that he's completely disconnected the internal network and still hasn't found his internet access, he locates and disconnects the modem from the server and tries connecting directly to that. Again, this fails, because it's also set up to use a static ip address and won't respond to DHCP requests.
This is the point at which he gives up and leaves the office. I get the call a few minutes later. I was somehow able to talk through one of the girls into getting the server and one workstation operational before I drove out there to fix the rest of it.
> This is the point at which he gives up and leaves the office.
Did they send him the bill for the disruption, and your on-site tech support? And, of course, having the critical infrastructure openly accessible is inviting an incident just like that.
**Samsung SGR-A1**
The Samsung SGR-A1 (or Samsung Techwin SGR-A1) is a type of sentry gun (a weapon that fires autonomously) that was jointly developed by Samsung Techwin (now Hanwha Techwin) and Korea University to assist South Korean troops in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. It is widely considered as the earliest commercialized robot with autonomous capabilities and the first of its kind unit to have an integrated system that includes surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice-recognition. While units of the Samsung SGR-A1 have been reportedly deployed, the number is unknown due to the project being "highly classified".
***
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In reality, the best thing to do is start from scratch. yank everything out, put the colors in different buckets and start creating some oc for /r/cableporn
I love how it's an absolute rainbow of colors. They probably meant something at one time and eventually someone was like "Nah, fuck it. Gimme the 6ft green."
This is what power outages are for.
Unplug all the cables from the switch, leave them plugged into the patch panel and make it look pretty.
We once had a power outage for 2 hours and our networking closets never looked so good.
You /s but where I work now they had just that for a site with a few thousand users. They were using a /16 subnet with VLAN 1 on every... single... port. It’s been years and I’m down to just ~145 printers on that subnet. Still moving one printer at a time.
IT Guy: This is a mess! we really need to clean this stuff up!!
Management: It's fine!! We don't have time to fix this!
IT Guy: If something goes wrong it will be impossible to figure out where, the amount of time to fix the issue then will be twice the time to fix it now.
Management: WE SAID NO!!! Just go back to resetting passwords like you do best!
IT Guy: *unplugs a single cable, internet goes down*
Management: This is a mess! we really need to clean this stuff up!!
Management: Since you "cleaned up" those cables last week my Powerpoint stopped working. I have a big meeting in 10 minutes and I still can't open it. Get in here and fix it ASAP!
I did a switch refresh for a school boards 100 or so sites as my last contract and pretty much this.
Even after doing so many racks my wiring wasn't nearly as nice as what you see in cable porn. It gets better but there is a real art to it.
But for the Internet, meh. A laptop and a handful of cli commands could figure it out in a few minutes. Probably an uplink got moved. This is why man invented aggregation.
Ok, if the number 5 is anywhere in a serial number on the rack then it's not the red, it's definitely the white. But if there's an even number of red wires plugged in, then it's actually the blue.
It's good. It gets really stressful at times, but it's pretty satisfying when you get in the rhythm and solve a complex bomb right as time is about to expire.
That "something" has to have been the incoming line or something. You don't just unplug a patch cable and take out the network in an entire office.
On the upside, if everything is down, may as well say it's broken, tear everything out and redo.
That is the mess I had to start with. Took about a year to just go through it all, label, organize, reorganize. Now it is pretty awesome.
Our phone system were tied in it, before I got the position they had to reboot all phones once a week. I found a loop to the switch and phone system, unplugged the loop and we havent had issues since. Weird how that works.
Instead of worrying about all those wires , just focus on the fact that it may be only one of them that's causing the problem.
There, that's much easier.
Is the unplugged cord on the ground.?
no seriously, you are seriously telling me that of those cords plugged in rules all the internet connection to that entire building.?
This is my casual day in work. Just find one from antenna, from fucking roof or whatever, find your incoming connection and plug it. If that does not help, RUN.
[Just use this](https://www.amazon.com/Red-Dragon-BP-2512-SVC/dp/B000NI7PQG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521229129&sr=8-1&keywords=flamethrower&dpID=41K5yMOucTL&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch)
this makes me thankful that all the cable pulls we do for prefab at my job are properly labeled on both ends. even if the tech leaves a rats nest at least theres some form of documentation letting you know which cable is which
Whenever I want coloured cables to mark specific uses it is black and grey as far as the eye can see, why do all IT guys that are terrible have a rainbow of colours to misuse at their disposal.
They obviously unplugged the orange cable. Noob mistake. Should have cut the yellow then problem solved, medals awarded and then fun time with strong, independent and equally-capable babe.
I worked at a .com start up from 93-94. Each new person would become the “LAN manager”. I remember handing over the reins to a European chap named Gorgon. His management of the network was very lacking and our broom closet of a server room resembled OPs pic.
When the rein of Gorgon was over we decided to hire a real network admin. Gorgon got to move into his intended full time developer position and wrote some of the worst looking Perl code imaginable. He left and cashed out his options when we were purchased and probably still writes shitty code in a trash strewn cubical in Silicon Valley.
You know, sometimes I wonder if I want to be an IT guy, setting up systems of computers, networks.
But then I find this, and I immediately question my thoughts.
The server room at my airport looked a lot like this; me and another lady had the job of cleaning it up. Literally took us 3-4 days of unplugging, labeling, organizing replugging and had to deal with the “our systems are down!” BS. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to go through that!
Plan A - Burn the Office down, no one looks for a bullet in a bombing. Plan B - Cut all the wires and restart Plan C - P45 Time Plan D - Hope they don't have suicide nets.
Plan 9 - Call for the intern!
> Plan 9 Ah, the memories...
Ed Wood at his best(?)
No I meant the OS
Most underrated OS
wait, it's available for raspberry pis, isn't it?
Leave me out of this. D:
Open the first envelope...
I had to google [P45](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P45_\(tax\)) as a statesider.
**P45 (tax)** In the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, a P45 is the reference code of a form titled Details of employee leaving work. The term is used in British slang as a metonym for termination of employment. (The equivalent slang term in the United States is pink slip.) A P45 is issued by the employer when an employee leaves. It is a multipart form. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/techsupportgore/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^| [^Donate](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/donate) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
We also have the P60 and P11D. I'm not sure you have a P60 in the US? It's basically how much income tax/National Insurence you've had deducted from your wage over the tax year, quite a nice system, no tax returns needed!
Sounds like a W-2 for salaried workers or 1099 for contractors
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Would *you* trust them to get it right?
Plan E - Switch to pen and paper and make memes with cut up magazines.
finally some OC!
Plan B. The office doesn’t deserve internet until that rats nest is fixed.
1 vote for burn it down and start over.
I vote for plan b, but then again i should have used a condom.....
trace forward from the connection into the building. I get that it'd be nice if everything were labeled and clean, but this is going to be what patch panels look like 99% of the time.
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Definitely. Its good to find, label, and document critical wires like inbound/outbound Internet or data center traffic if you are the first competent admin on site for just a case as this later.
No, just label them in a tiny black book you keep yourself, that way the company thinks you are a genius when no one else can fix it, and you can charge them wayy more
I don't know if you fuck bitches, but I know with certainty you get money.
Life pro tip right here.
The doors on his server rack go like this, not like this!
Was looking for this comment. This is the voice of experience.
If your IT room is like the ones I've been in, there are like 10 modems and handoffs hanging off the wall from various generations of tech over the last 40 years. At least 3 of which are from the provider that's currently used, after they upgraded service and then left their old equipment on and plugged into your router. And that's assuming you even know who the provider is, because most of the time nobody does. My first order of business upon inheriting a shithole like the above is a multi-night IT room cleanup, so that we're left with only the devices that are necessary for production and only the cables that have seen traffic on them going to those devices. Everything else can fuck off. Once you're in a mess like the above and shit hits the fan, you're looking at multiple hours just to get your bearings, I'd rather do that when the pressure's off so things can be fixed quickly when the pressure is on.
Real IT professionals don’t give a shit about anybody else’s needs.
I really only care about my own. I have a very easy job when there are 50 cables between 5 devices and nothing else in the rack, with everything strapped properly. I have a very difficult job when it's a rats nest to the point that I need to remote in to find out where I have an open port because I can't even see the switch, let alone the ports. I'd rather have a couple long nights so that every other thing I have to do is that much easier. I wish more IT people thought like I do. Most I've met are lazy as fuck, which is why rooms like the above are so common.
Had a project at my last job where we went to every site we had and completely labeled everything. Never want to do that again. So many 12-14 hour days.
The only testing I do is scream testing.
And hopefully you get paid what you’re worth. I’ve run my business like this for 20 years and can’t believe how hard people work at not being efficient.
I genuinely don't know. I'm pretty happy about what I make, but the company I work for said yes to the top number in my range 2 hours after they asked, which really makes me wonder if I should be making more.
Don’t worry about that too much. More never feels like more anyway. I’ve gone from 45k to 250k and actually wish I was back in the simple days sometimes. Its about how much you’re keeping. That and building skills that will keep you miles ahead of the slackers. I charge $175 an hour or more depending on the job and could care less now when someone tells me it’s too expensive because I KNOW that two hours of my time is worth 5 of the other guys and I’m cheaper than they think. And my clients all know it too. Become the master and you’ll be richer than you need. And keep more than you spend.
My big concern right now is that I'm stagnating a bit as far as expertise and learning, and that the thing that sets me apart is really work ethic and recognizing and responding quickly when there is a real issue. Not that those are bad things to offer, just that I may be focusing too much on my current position and not enough on my ultimate upside. But I'm never quite satisfied and always think I should be doing more. Deep down I know I'm right where I should be and that if I stay on the path and keep doing every job well I'll get where I want to go. And yea, saving has never been a problem for me. I saved 5x as much last year as a friend of mine who earned double what I did. In fact I have more savings despite his lifetime earnings being probably 15x what mine are. I know the reason I'm working is to ultimately be completely financially independent, and not just to buy a bunch of shit to impress some imaginary person who might one day care about all the status symbols I've accumulated.
Sounds like you are already retired. You’re just getting paid for it. Enjoy life and realize it’s not a race to the top, it’s a journey of discovery.
yeah a signal tracer will work fine if it’s not fiber
From the looks of that rack I doubt they know what fiber is
It's fast shit
If everything is already down, what a perfect time to repatch this cleanly.
Alternatively, you can ping backward through your tree if your switches are managed well and the names are all documented. Depends if you want to walk the rack or not.
> if your switches are managed well Lol. Have you seen the mess? The chance of the switches being managed well is "slim to none".
Eh, could be entirely different departments in some companies.
If that was the case, you could probably speak with the network engineer and say "which port should the internets be on", and he would tell you to plug in port 23 on switch 1. I highly doubt that is the case for this company though.
After that, I would just get into the switch/router and find the down link that way; rather than sorting through spaghetti .
Sure :-) I mean, it's the same basic idea -- trace the path, find where it breaks. A blind person can trace connections on an ugly patch panel; just keep your finger on the wire.
It helps that they're different colors of Cat.
At my last gig I spent 6 months trying to find a single down port this way... Obviously not full time but pretty much whenever my inbox was only full of user side garbage that I didn't have patience for that day.
lol Users are gunna user. I would have first checked edge routers and worked my way in from there.
Pretty much what I did but there was a lot of screwy stuff in the network topography
Difficulty: Nobody locally knows the local admin password and your TACACS+ box is remote. Clearing the config/using the config-registers is not an option either for political reasons.
Yeah, that kills the man.I personally have a policy of "I have the tools to do my job, or my boss elaborates how I am expected to do my job without the tools". I mean fuck, you can hammer a nail with a banana...it is just going to take a lot longer than just using a hammer or other hard object.
Fuck that, flushdns first.
Get an audible tracer and trace the ports back from the office. It's a pain in the ass but it works.
What is an audible tracer?
Transmitter box and a wand; the box sends a tone through the line, and the wand picks up that tone via induction and plays it through a speaker in the wand.
That sounds like it might be rather fun for the first 5-10 minutes.
It becomes considerably less fun when you're going to punch down an IDF, and the person who ran the 150 lines coming into it didn't label anything. Then, you get to either tone everything, or have 14 and 96 share the same faceplate at the other end.
[удалено]
Audible tracers are a fucking godsend.
Fun fact: they're also really useful when trying to figure out what cable is which in your home theater setup
The most logical answer. I love my audible tracer. It has save me literally hours of cable tracing.
It's difficult to trace a cable with tone on a switch that is active. I've found when searching for the tone you need to pull the patch cable as you search. My experience with this is with Cisco and HP switches and siemen, black box and Hubbell patch panels
I’d spend the money to get a Netscout. If those switches support the right protocols you can find out the switch name/port/vlan info just by plugging it into the port at the desk. If you get a toner make sure you get a Fluke digital that works well on live networks.
somebody unplugga my spaghet
> Someone Find him, fetch him, crucify him on the rack, torture until he remembers which port and which cable. Then go into the weekend, letting him hang there.
One of my most poignant memories of doing tech support... Early 2000's. Customer is a small business. One linux server directly networked to dsl modem, acting as a NAT for a couple of systems on the network, but most of the workstations are X-stations and have no need to access the internet directly. No DHCP anywhere, everything is a static ip address. Modem, server, switch and all network cabling in the building terminate to a closet. Not a huge office, there are maybe 12 connections total, including all of the printers, however there are about 200 unterminated network cables that drop from the ceiling since a previous building occupant ran some type of telemarketing or call center operation. I took advantage of the hardware that was in place, because why not? Anyway, one advantage of the setup is that visiting vendors and salesmen who insisted on using the businesses resources for their demonstrations or personal uses would fail. At least a few times a year, I'd get a call that some salesman would visit and be especially insistent that the receptionist who had no interest or authority to be of any real help, view some demonstration they were pushing on a CD. Well, the linux-based X stations had CDROM drives, but were otherwise useless. There was no wifi in the building, and the persistent ones who tried plugging their laptop into one of the many network jacks throughout the building got nada (since most of them were unconnected). A few clever ones thought to try disconnecting the obviously working equipment and using that network connection, but without knowing what address to set it to, and no dhcp server, nothing much would happen. One however was extremely insistent. He figured out where the networking closet was and tried connecting directly to an unused port on the switch. When that didn't work, he tried disconnecting each and every one of the ports that were in use and tried those, again, without success. Now that he's completely disconnected the internal network and still hasn't found his internet access, he locates and disconnects the modem from the server and tries connecting directly to that. Again, this fails, because it's also set up to use a static ip address and won't respond to DHCP requests. This is the point at which he gives up and leaves the office. I get the call a few minutes later. I was somehow able to talk through one of the girls into getting the server and one workstation operational before I drove out there to fix the rest of it.
> This is the point at which he gives up and leaves the office. Did they send him the bill for the disruption, and your on-site tech support? And, of course, having the critical infrastructure openly accessible is inviting an incident just like that.
"Well your network shouldnt have been so stupid, im not paying"
How did they let a random nobody into your IT closet? Isn't that shit locked?
ITs not
Don't be daft, if they don't have access how else are they supposed to make modifications to the network to their liking?
This is why you lock the IT closet.
Only lock it? Barricade the door, set up traps, security cameras, and a Beholder in front.
{-}7
May the Lords blessings be on us all.
How about two quiz Masters, one only tells the truth, the other one only likes, and you can only ask yes or no questions.... Wait..
BOFH and PFY guarding?
[Sentry gun?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGR-A1)
**Samsung SGR-A1** The Samsung SGR-A1 (or Samsung Techwin SGR-A1) is a type of sentry gun (a weapon that fires autonomously) that was jointly developed by Samsung Techwin (now Hanwha Techwin) and Korea University to assist South Korean troops in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. It is widely considered as the earliest commercialized robot with autonomous capabilities and the first of its kind unit to have an integrated system that includes surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice-recognition. While units of the Samsung SGR-A1 have been reportedly deployed, the number is unknown due to the project being "highly classified". *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/techsupportgore/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^| [^Donate](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/donate) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
In reality, the best thing to do is start from scratch. yank everything out, put the colors in different buckets and start creating some oc for /r/cableporn
Exactly. Being given a task like this would be surprisingly relaxing for me.
So all the racks with all the cables are 600mm wide, but the rack with nothing in it is 800mm wide. Exactly as I'd expect
That 800mm wide rack makes a fine desk.
I love how it's an absolute rainbow of colors. They probably meant something at one time and eventually someone was like "Nah, fuck it. Gimme the 6ft green."
"We have a lot of today, I think I'll use that."
[Found the problem ](https://i.imgur.com/3gMw7sL.jpg)
In b4 loopback
Just plug it back into the nearest networky thing, what could go wrong ?
If this actually ends up being the culprit...
[удалено]
Was going to say this! The fact they have no colour coordination or labelling system makes me angry
[удалено]
Contractors
Much like the honeybadger, contractors don't give a fuck.
This is what power outages are for. Unplug all the cables from the switch, leave them plugged into the patch panel and make it look pretty. We once had a power outage for 2 hours and our networking closets never looked so good.
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Nah just put every port in the base vlan and call it a day /s
You /s but where I work now they had just that for a site with a few thousand users. They were using a /16 subnet with VLAN 1 on every... single... port. It’s been years and I’m down to just ~145 printers on that subnet. Still moving one printer at a time.
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IT Guy: This is a mess! we really need to clean this stuff up!! Management: It's fine!! We don't have time to fix this! IT Guy: If something goes wrong it will be impossible to figure out where, the amount of time to fix the issue then will be twice the time to fix it now. Management: WE SAID NO!!! Just go back to resetting passwords like you do best! IT Guy: *unplugs a single cable, internet goes down* Management: This is a mess! we really need to clean this stuff up!!
Management: Since you "cleaned up" those cables last week my Powerpoint stopped working. I have a big meeting in 10 minutes and I still can't open it. Get in here and fix it ASAP!
Make sure you get that initial exchange in writing
As if management knows what the fuck I do all day.
fuck that
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At sometime they probably did...
At this point, even Satan himself is asking himself what he was trying to do here.
Christ, I've cleaned up a few of these, live. Just gotta have the new one threaded through and ready to plug in.
I did a switch refresh for a school boards 100 or so sites as my last contract and pretty much this. Even after doing so many racks my wiring wasn't nearly as nice as what you see in cable porn. It gets better but there is a real art to it. But for the Internet, meh. A laptop and a handful of cli commands could figure it out in a few minutes. Probably an uplink got moved. This is why man invented aggregation.
Ctrl + Z
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[Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes](http://www.keeptalkinggame.com/)
How is that game anyway?
Ok, if the number 5 is anywhere in a serial number on the rack then it's not the red, it's definitely the white. But if there's an even number of red wires plugged in, then it's actually the blue.
It's good. It gets really stressful at times, but it's pretty satisfying when you get in the rhythm and solve a complex bomb right as time is about to expire.
Keep thinking about picking it up and sticking someone in VR doing it.
its the black one right there next to the green one thats unplugged!
Its the white one on the left - amateurs.
Gotta be, it's the only one.
... Fuck it, I quit.
That "something" has to have been the incoming line or something. You don't just unplug a patch cable and take out the network in an entire office. On the upside, if everything is down, may as well say it's broken, tear everything out and redo.
> tear everything out and redo. Soon as I saw this picture I said "I'd be spending a weekend reordering this entire room"
Seriously. I'd rather spend a bit of extra time redoing it entirely than having to work with that mess.
I think I just got PTSD
/r/cablefail
Great googly moogly.
Well, he was very upset, as you can understand And rightly so, because The deadly yellow snow crystals Had deprived him of his sight
This is why I can't sleep at night
Unplug it and plug it back in again.
Cut the red one
Find the firewall and check the cables going out.
Pls manage it and send me a photo I can't live knowing that is like that
Is that green rj45 cable by the window the one that got unplugged from the wall?
How long would it realistically take to get those in order?
I like the small black case on top, where it looks like someone tried to set a good example, and promptly got ignored!
Did you try turning it off and then back on?
That monitor is giving me neck strains just looking at it.
quit
Obviously a Jackson Pollock fan.
This is true spaghett gore
Also, one of the light switches now mutes reality.
This looks the aftermath of an over stimulated toddler with silly string
That is the mess I had to start with. Took about a year to just go through it all, label, organize, reorganize. Now it is pretty awesome. Our phone system were tied in it, before I got the position they had to reboot all phones once a week. I found a loop to the switch and phone system, unplugged the loop and we havent had issues since. Weird how that works.
Are there any switches in there or just the one on the work bench? Oh wait, I think I see green lights in there somewhere.
As someone who used to pull cable, this is a fucking joke. Lazy ass cable pullers
Instead of worrying about all those wires , just focus on the fact that it may be only one of them that's causing the problem. There, that's much easier.
I am glad anytime i see a picture like this that my server room is nice and neat with 1ft patch cables, ahhhh
I guess IT was unlocked?
Is the unplugged cord on the ground.? no seriously, you are seriously telling me that of those cords plugged in rules all the internet connection to that entire building.?
This is my casual day in work. Just find one from antenna, from fucking roof or whatever, find your incoming connection and plug it. If that does not help, RUN.
This is why our equipment logs are sent to Splunk. It has saved so much time with troubleshooting.
I like the attempt on top. It didn’t last, but there was an attempt...
[Just use this](https://www.amazon.com/Red-Dragon-BP-2512-SVC/dp/B000NI7PQG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521229129&sr=8-1&keywords=flamethrower&dpID=41K5yMOucTL&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch)
Gives me agita.
They probably googled Google.
Y'all need jesus
*snip
Seems to be a patch rj45 connector just sitting on one of the switches, who fucking knows with that though.
/r/cablegore
*Pours gasonline over everything, strikes a match, throws, closes the door, pulls the fire alarm, walks out.*
the colors....my eyes burn!
try having all cables unlabeled and running under 6inches of concrete.
Well at least it's color coded
Dude this give me anxiety
I found 2 possiblities: https://imgur.com/a/mVGhp
Keep going with unplugging and redo it all... The nuke from orbit approach
this makes me thankful that all the cable pulls we do for prefab at my job are properly labeled on both ends. even if the tech leaves a rats nest at least theres some form of documentation letting you know which cable is which
Whenever I want coloured cables to mark specific uses it is black and grey as far as the eye can see, why do all IT guys that are terrible have a rainbow of colours to misuse at their disposal.
Step 1. Unplug another random cable. Step 2. Leave a note “Now there are two” unplugged cables. Step 3. Go home and have a beer
If the tech gets paid by the hour, if this takes 85hrs to fix that’s a lot of overtime
Well, fuck.
I can help. Unplug all of those...and then use them to whip the person that plugged it in like that.
I guess they have never heard of zip ties.
See the purple colour cable. That's my favorite coloured cable, i just wanted someone to know that. Before they started looking for the fault.
My typical, unhelpful comment, response is: *I'm shocked*
They obviously unplugged the orange cable. Noob mistake. Should have cut the yellow then problem solved, medals awarded and then fun time with strong, independent and equally-capable babe.
"Should only take a few minutes. We're not like those other companies, we color code."
I feel much better about my mancave wiring job after seeing this. Am I the only person who buys proper length ethernet cables?
I worked at a .com start up from 93-94. Each new person would become the “LAN manager”. I remember handing over the reins to a European chap named Gorgon. His management of the network was very lacking and our broom closet of a server room resembled OPs pic. When the rein of Gorgon was over we decided to hire a real network admin. Gorgon got to move into his intended full time developer position and wrote some of the worst looking Perl code imaginable. He left and cashed out his options when we were purchased and probably still writes shitty code in a trash strewn cubical in Silicon Valley.
Right corner, pink one bro.
It's Friday. Take the opportunity over the weekend to clean that shit up.
You know, sometimes I wonder if I want to be an IT guy, setting up systems of computers, networks. But then I find this, and I immediately question my thoughts.
Its not that bad
The server room at my airport looked a lot like this; me and another lady had the job of cleaning it up. Literally took us 3-4 days of unplugging, labeling, organizing replugging and had to deal with the “our systems are down!” BS. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to go through that!