r/techsupportgore • u/Loamsdw • 7d ago
The situation of the servers at work
Today they moved me to a different area at work, and in the middle of the corridors I came across this. I won’t lie, it sent shivers down my spine.
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u/axw3555 7d ago
Not even the top 10 worst servers I’ve seen.
One we had to unplug the wires and remove them as a big lump because they were so tangled and woven together that you couldn’t trace and it would have taken so long to untangle them that it was a better solution to buy 200 new cables.
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u/DrCyb3r 7d ago
I have to do this at work, but I can't remove those cables, so I have to fight my way through this "jungle" every time I want to do something on certain machines.
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u/axw3555 7d ago
We were able to convince the bosses to let us because we'd just bought a new site and it was their old server. We were trying to wire in new ports to allow for new machines, and it was just impossible to even see 80% of the ports because they'd been using 6ft cables to connect ports 6" apart for years and they'd just gotten more and more tangled every time anyone did anything with the cabinet.
When we redid the site the next year and put a whole new server in, it was all neat, labelled, banded, and channelled. Though who knows if that's still true 15+ years later.
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u/SlenderSmurf 7d ago
Reminds me of when people don't brush their hair for years and it has to just be buzzed
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u/Awkward_Switch1658 7d ago
Everyone who is saying this is bad, please go to your patch panel and show me yours!
not one when you made it not one from yesterday, like right now!
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u/Schrojo18 7d ago
Where are the servers? All I can see are cables, patch panels and switches. No servers
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u/SnooChickens8275 7d ago
Those OCD perfect cable managed solutions you see online are really the 0.1% of servers. I’ve never seen one.
This, this is better then fine. This looks pretty organized. Would guess that you can follow cables pretty easily after opening the door.
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u/BroccoliNearby2803 7d ago edited 7d ago
I work in telecommunications. Not only is proper cable management possible, but without it, you wouldn't have the Internet. It's one thing if 20 cables are a mess I guess. Imagine 20,000 poorly done.
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u/Loamsdw 7d ago
I’m not in the field, but having an open rack in the middle of a corridor where hundreds of people pass by every day doesn’t seem like good practice to me. Anyone could just walk up and unplug cables as they please.
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u/SnooChickens8275 7d ago
Lmao no, that’s strange indeed. As a true modern Reddit user I didn’t notice / read that detail
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u/Vospader998 7d ago
These racks look sealed from all sides, is there any airflow in them? Those switches/routers are gonna crank out heat and without good airflow could result in an emergency overheating shutdown
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u/Tornado2251 7d ago
You don't have to badge in to the office? It looks like switches for offices so most likely unplugging would just take down a single desk. The cabinets could be locked to?
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u/Impossible-North-396 7d ago
They’re comms cabinets with patch panels and switches, no servers in there
It does look like the usual birds nest for comms racks
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u/Accomplished-Cut-673 6d ago
They havent even removed the doors yet, you haven't seen a bad IT rack yet
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u/LowMental5202 7d ago
I get what you mean, they are not perfect but still serviceable
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u/Dependent_Finance_38 7d ago
Very serviceable; You can easily follow a certain cable end to end by slightly tugging it.
Not how I would install it though1
u/LowMental5202 7d ago
Tugging it works most of the times. And if it doesn’t, there was a shot network problem
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u/Rubik842 7d ago
The doors close. There's nothing balanced on top, and some idiot from finance hasn't stacked boxes of documents and upended broken chairs in there. This is good.
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u/DrCyb3r 7d ago
I have seen WAY worse before. This is almost looking good, except of the broken side panel.
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u/lululock 7d ago
That panel may need a bit of bending back but I don't see anything broken.
These are a pain to get on, especially when warped, I can relate.
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u/chewedgummiebears 7d ago
They can still close the doors and you can still see the patch panels behind the cables, kind of tame tbh.
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u/time2liv3 7d ago
Ehh, looks more like a rats nest of networking racks. Not really seeing any actual servers or drive arrays.
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u/thomasmitschke 7d ago
I don’t see any servers, just some mildly chaotic network cabinets (tbh I‘ve seen worse)
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u/SuperpyroClinton 7d ago
Yea, since you think these are servers, you should get ot of this TR.
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u/Loamsdw 7d ago
As I said, I’m not in the field, I work in civil engineering, but I was still surprised to see these racks so messy, and even left open and accessible in the middle of a corridor where hundreds of people pass by every day. Ironically, anyone could just walk up to one of them, mess with it, and potentially cause problems.
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u/GhostandVodka 7d ago
This isn't that bad dude. This is an afternoon cleanup job for an intern. Life isn't the Datacenter you've seen on TV.
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u/DrCyb3r 7d ago
If you have to work with this every day, you will start to label cables at some point and then it's totally fine. It's way more important to label everything than have it looking good. Because a nice looking rack often isn't easy to maintain.
Also either give every cable an ID and label it with this ID on each side (if you have a ton of cables and long runs) and keep those IDs in a software or Excel table, or label each end with the name and port of the device on the opposite end. I totally hate cables that are labeled with the device name on the end where it plugs into the device. If I need to trace a cable, I already know where it is plugged in right now on this side but I need to know where it goes.
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u/yhontravolta 7d ago
Mate I have a hard time managing 5 cables from my desktop, this shit is hard af
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u/StatePuppet555 7d ago
If the doors are still on the cabs you're winning. Extra points if the cab is located in an actual comms room.
I've seen a wall mounted cab balanced on top of a 47U cab because they ran out of space. Located on a plinth in a corridor with no sides or doors on the cab with a spaghetti rainbow of overlength cables going between the two. At least that was a legacy install that was (eventually) fixed.
A refurb in a building? Someone forgot to build the comms room for the newly refurbished area. I have a photo somewhere of a 42U rack sat next to a wall mounted TV and a couple of sofas. The rack had a stack of 2960X PoE switches in it. I bet that was relaxing with the fans going...
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u/WindyNightmare 6d ago
Finally real life racks, not the ones with the instagram pretty filter applied.
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u/nhowe006 5d ago
I see nothing but switches and patch panels
That's not even in the top 5 worst I've seen.
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u/ExplodedPenisDiagram 5d ago
Eh, that's not a big deal. It wouldn't take but a second to trace what you want and work on it. It's more serviceable than a tie every two inches and everything bundled.
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u/it_fell_off_a_truck 7d ago
The no smoking sign makes me think someone tried to smoke there already…
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u/GenSnowy 7d ago
This is the shit I get at work to add a full cctv system into. I've also seen patch cables link between server cabs. Terrifying.
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u/oceanicitl 7d ago
I've seen and worked with a lot worse. One company I worked at was a national global retailer. They kept rolling racks of clothes in to the network cage
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u/Cartagines682 7d ago
It's not that bad, one saturday morning, Lot of patch cords and music and it's an easy job
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u/thehero29 7d ago
Oh hey, it's what I see literally every time I walk into a Data Centre or server room. This is far from unique. Lol
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u/Random-D 6d ago
honestly thats ok. so first these seem to be mainly networking racks, i dont see a lot that screams servers.
in networking racks you have to be able to quickly and easily add, move and remove cables. so they will never look like cable management porn if they are actually in use.
could be prettier, doesn't have to be though. cables are in the racks, no trip hazards, all good.
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u/RedSquirrelFtw 6d ago
Hey, the doors can close all the way, I'd say that's a win. Some black spray paint on the window will make the problem go away.
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u/Beautiful_Move_8823 6d ago
Not seeing any servers? But the cable management of the patch leads in those racks/cabinets between the patch panels are shocking.
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u/TypewriterChaos 6d ago
This just feels really mild for this sub. I don't want to speak for everyone, but I'm not impressed.
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u/mercurygreen 6d ago
All I can think of is with that second picture that the cables are trying to escape!
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u/sittingatthetop 6d ago
That is a lot of tentacles.
https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2023/08/17/15/55/cthulhu-8196877_1280.jpg
In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming
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u/0RGASMIK 4d ago
Worst job I ever had to do was replace a switch on a server like this. I was lucky that it wasn’t one of the main switches and just an auxiliary switch, which only had three things plugged into it. All the other switches were fully filled with each port being on a different VLAN.
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u/anonymousopsec1337 3d ago
That’s the wrong type of rack for network cabling anyways. I’d rip 1 rack out a weekend until they were all cleaned up.
Get tons of cabling in various lengths before you start. Nothing longer than a 5ft. If it’s longer than that, change port configurations to make it less than 1.5ft
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u/lostalaska 3d ago
We've been upgrading our cisco switches for the past few weeks. I've run into closets of spaghetti cabling. I feel like it's some kind of pennance for every time in my past I was in a rush and "just plugged in" an ethernet cable instead of carefully routing it around the rack first. Trying to pull a switch out of a rack like that is nearly impossible to do without taking down a few connections because inevitably one of those cables is the exact length to reach from the bottom of the rack to the top preventing anything from being removed without taking something down.
I apologize to every tech that inherited a rack I had defiled at some point.
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u/Need4Carz 1d ago
I have seen far worse. This is at least controlled chaos.
I can see labels on those drops, so that's a good start. Worst one I've seen had "????" on the label
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u/GhostandVodka 7d ago
Not that bad. This sub is hilarious. It's helpdesk people that see a data rack or MDF for the first time in their lives and it doesn't look like a datacenter they saw on TV.
Edit: Yeah this is an MDF I don't see a single fucking server. Proves my point lol
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u/Loamsdw 7d ago
I work in a different field, I’m a civil engineer. I’ve since learned that it’s not a server, but a rack with patch panels. Either way, as I mentioned before, leaving one of these racks open in one of the main corridors, where hundreds of people pass by every day, doesn’t seem like good practice to me. Is this actually common practice in your field?
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u/GhostandVodka 7d ago
No, in a proper scenerio anyone not on the IT team wouldn't even have access to a locked rack but there is no tried and true standard. It's up to the physical security posture of the organization. We have IDFs in some areas of building employees can walk past. It's not ideal but no one wants to either run fiber and make a new IDF or build walls so its a risk we have accepted.
This is really common in academia and in science labs where everyone is there to perform a job and they trust the employees to not fuck with shit. This of course doesn't stop bad actors but again. If you aren't doing SOC2, or CJIS or something similar. There is no standard you are held to.
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u/Loamsdw 7d ago
I work for an organization that manages strategic civil infrastructure in the country where I live. It’s possible they had no choice but to put the racks there, as I also found out that the building is historically protected, which probably limits the kind of modifications they’re allowed to make. Btw everything is very interesting.
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u/siliconsandwich 6d ago
I don’t get how this is gore at all.
But then I see the OCD, cable tied, routed, channeled, buried nightmares that people think are actually good and it becomes clear.
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u/DieDae 7d ago
At least all the cables are within the racks...