Patch Panels and cable management

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Hey all,

I have the mother of all jobs this Sunday . I have to re-patch a patch panel in one of our offices, and it is an absolute mess! On top of this, I have to move servers around in the cabinet as well. I feel this is going to be an all dayer, so I best start early.

The plan is to move the switches directly below the patch panels, so that way I can use 1m Cat6. The patch panels have no gap in between each row of 24 ports, so what I might do is create a space in between each one to feed cables through. It's currently meant to be yellow cables for data and green for voice, but the cabinet looks like Joseph's amazing technicolour dreamcoat at present!

And it looks like people before me like to use the plastic cable ties which you have to cut off when you need to remove a cable. Looks like some people haven't heard of velcro ! Currently, you literally cannot see the servers as the wires dangle straight down, so I'll be using velcro cable ties down the sides of the rack for the cables to be fed through. At my last place, they had trays in front of the patch panel to keep everything nice and neat.

After this I need to lower the Firebox and the client switch further down in the rack, put in the new server, configure Backup Exec on this and then test everything. Oh well, it's double time I suppose, lol!

Just wondered what type of 'fun' have you guys had with cabling patch panels...

 

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I did this one a month or so ago, had 3 hub rooms in a similar state. Like you say, double time so can't complain!

 

Once your cabinet is glorious, I can guarantee that your hard work will be undone in a short amount of time by idiots.

 

That I don't doubt Craigie! At my last place, it seemed departments had desk moves for the fun of it every other month. And the once nice, lovely and neat cabinet was back to being beyond a mess! I bet for some orgs, patch cabling is probably a full time job in its own right.

 

Take a before and after photo. Post them above your desk (and on this site too ;) ) so that when someone else ends up messing it up again, you can just point at the picture and tell everyone that your end of the job was done perfectly

 

Our cabinet is a helluva a mess (again) at the moment after a nice spate of musical desks...

...done without mentioning them to the IT department until they discovered that nothing worked anymore.

I've got to spend some time rerunning all the power cables in the server cabinet as well seeing as little thought was given to the possibility of expansion in our server rack so we've got extension cables swinging in the breeze behind the rack because our latest new server wouldn't fit with them in place.

 

Always the case! I've went as far as putting before and after pics on the cabinet - with a warning that anyone who messes it up will have their fingers broken

 

I'm glad that the phone system is Cisco VoIP as I don't have to worry about what ports to plug them back into on the switch. They do have a separate VLAN for call recording, but even if I get this wrong I can sort it out Monday morning quickly enough. But I plan on making no mistakes on Sunday, but last time I checked I am a human being and not a robot, lol!

At my last place, I had to do a re-patch on a cabinet. And this was a several years ago just before they went to VoIP. I stood at a user's desk with my mobile doing a test call to their DDI, only for the phone to ring on a desk 20 feet away ! That took me a 12 hour day on a Saturday to sort this out amongst other things.

 

Or do what I did once, someone had to have a new extension in there and then in the middle of the day, being as at the time IT was only my part time job, the boss who I report to was in the middle of a telephone call when I cut him off, pulled out the wrong patch cable.

 

You managed to do that and 3 others like it in one day? Amazing. For most people it takes months, if not years to get it to this state.

Maybe you could go into the server room and make a few sketches of what you plan to do and measure it all up to make sure that it all fits.

Another thing, if you're going to move all the patch panels did you think about inserting the switches in between them and using half metre cables to connect each panel to the switch immediately underneath it?

 

hahaha

 

Yes, I had a good look round while I was there on Friday (the office is up in Hull and I am based in the Sheffield HO). Didn't make any sketches I'll admit, but I have a good idea of what I want to do.

With regards to putting switches in between patch panels, that makes very good sense. I do have a great deal of 0.5m cables spare, and in the right colours that I want to use to separate voice from data. Never seen it done this way, but it has given me food for thought. I was thinking of sticking the new server straight underneath the patch panel and the switches underneath that. This is because the SCSI cable from the tape drive to the new server is only about a metre in length. So I may have to have it sat on top of the cabinet (the cabinet is about 5 feet high). Already let my manager know and she's fine with it, but I'd rather not if I had the choice. I'll see what I can sort.

 

I've just finished filling in the CR for this work in time for tomorrow's CR meeting among the managers.

On the part where it says 'what is my back out plan' Erm..................................

 

Drop tools and run for the hills, that's the back out plan

 

VLANs FTW

 

yeah it amazes me the amount of people that still re patch
sometimes its budget (we don't want to patch every port in)

other times its with good reason (were moving a analogue port)

but seriously
patch EVERYTHING IN TO THE SWITCH
set it to an unrouted/unused vlan (for security)
document the switchport-floorport mappings
then do everything else from vlan membership
oh thats a phone port now? let me change you to vlan 20.. from my desk!

 

^^ This ^^

I'm actually doing this in our Glasgow office next week. Eight hours' work - saving probably 100 hours' work over the next year. It boggles the mind why people don't VLAN - or buy enough switch capacity to patch every floor port in.

 

West Nile St - right smack in the centre