The natural environment of a Systems Officer is messy cable closets. Rats nest cabling is the worst!
Drawn by Likeshine
Drawn by Likeshine
Category Artwork (Traditional) / General Furry Art
Species Hawk
Size 831 x 1280px
File Size 217.4 kB
Listed in Folders
Ah, I misquoted slightly. Anyway, here's the scene.
https://youtu.be/3G8Ncg3xFoY?t=326
https://youtu.be/3G8Ncg3xFoY?t=326
As racks go, that one's pretty easy. You can actually see and move the cables.
A Real Rack has a few hundred cables in. Some well-meaning former technician will have cable-tied most of them into place and made sure they are all the optimal length to produce a very tidy looking rack in the past, but also one which makes it impossible to re-patch - if the cables are all exactly long enough, you can't move them to a new port. This will have been fixed by adding in a lot of new cables danging all over the place. There may once have been a color code, but repairs in haste mean that will be followed only very loosely. There will be some bundles of cable that disappear behind the rack to be coiled up out of the way and reemerge a short distance away, so you cannot tell which cable going in corresponds to which coming out.
Somewhere there will be a 48-port switch - cables packed in so densely that you can't even get a finger in to press the release catch, and must resort to wriggling a screwdriver through the tangle to press it. The thick tangle will obscure status indicator lights and labels. There will probably be several of these switches.
A few cables will snake off outside of the rack through the door, so it can no longer be closed, and disappear into other racks - temporary solutions installed long ago to address a lack of ports or some unusual wiring requirements to support shared cabling, when the public address or security systems are using wiring originally installed for another purpose. These temporary solutions are seldom as temporary as intended.
I actually work on these things professionally, and the ones I deal with are a lot worse.
A Real Rack has a few hundred cables in. Some well-meaning former technician will have cable-tied most of them into place and made sure they are all the optimal length to produce a very tidy looking rack in the past, but also one which makes it impossible to re-patch - if the cables are all exactly long enough, you can't move them to a new port. This will have been fixed by adding in a lot of new cables danging all over the place. There may once have been a color code, but repairs in haste mean that will be followed only very loosely. There will be some bundles of cable that disappear behind the rack to be coiled up out of the way and reemerge a short distance away, so you cannot tell which cable going in corresponds to which coming out.
Somewhere there will be a 48-port switch - cables packed in so densely that you can't even get a finger in to press the release catch, and must resort to wriggling a screwdriver through the tangle to press it. The thick tangle will obscure status indicator lights and labels. There will probably be several of these switches.
A few cables will snake off outside of the rack through the door, so it can no longer be closed, and disappear into other racks - temporary solutions installed long ago to address a lack of ports or some unusual wiring requirements to support shared cabling, when the public address or security systems are using wiring originally installed for another purpose. These temporary solutions are seldom as temporary as intended.
I actually work on these things professionally, and the ones I deal with are a lot worse.
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