Current Events > Something I really hate about network administration - cable faults

(+) Yeah! (+)

I swear, this is one of the biggest annoyances of this line of work. You either get a cable that:

• Didn't get manufactured well and is bad out of the box
• Gets damaged by... something... somewhere along the line between when you took it out of the box and when you used it
• Is an old cable that used to work, but now doesn't for whatever reason

Then you can have perfectly good cables, and then users end up doing stuff like kicking the wrong thing and knocking something over, causing the copper to break.

Or you can have a vendor install a new cable run, not test it, and leave... Then you eventually getting around to trying to use it and you have to go through a process to figure out that the vendor ran a bad cable.

Just spent a freaking hour and a half troubleshooting connectivity for a printer.

• Printer had a link light - switch port did not
• Moved device to another switch port, no dice
• Replaced patch cable - no dice
• Unplugged cable from switch side entirely - Printer still has a link light
• "WTF, the printer isn't plugged into that port then"
• Turns out there's just a short in the cable run that the vendor never tested, so now we're stuck and we have to get the vendor back out to fix it.

I had never seen a short in a cable run that isn't plugged into a switch still have electricity going on in it somehow in order to make the printer think it's plugged into the network.

Printer (link light) <--patch cable--> (wall port) <cable run with short>-----| (no cable) | Switchport

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Me in the interview: so uh, I don't really lay cables. I have difficulties with motor skills that involve fine control
Principal: well actually we have an entire company that handles all of the wiring in the building as we decided it was better that way

I sincerely feel sorry for you TC

as a storage engineer I fight this battle all the time. ive recently learned that 32gb fiber is flakey as fuck. connections will drop and after hours of troubleshooting all it needed was a cleaning and a polish. never hit snags like that on slower speeds...

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Awww WTF

So the vendor did the cable termination, but terminated some of the copper pairs in one punch block, and the rest of the copper pairs in another punch block.

Hoooooooooooooooooooooow

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWW

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